January cable news ratings came out yesterday and contained a few notable surprises.

Perhaps the most notable was this.

Despite the continued dominance of Fox News, the fourth most-watched cable channel in Primetime -- that's cable channel not cable news channel -- Glenn Beck's ratings slipped in January.

A lot.

Year over year he posted the biggest loss of any cable news show averaging 1.8 million viewers, down 39% from January 2010. In 25-54 demo he dropped 48%, to 397,000.

Becks ratings have been struggling all month. And by struggling we mean he as been consistently below the 2 million total viewers mark. A first.

Last April a big deal was made when Beck's ratings tumbled from 2.9 in January to 2.1 in April. They rebounded over the summer (as evidenced by his well-attended rally) but dropped again in October when he slipped behind Bret Baier for the first time.

Still, 1.9 is a drop from his October average of 2.9 million.

So what's behind this drop? It's entirely possible viewers are simply tiring of the chalkboard and the high rhetoric, which has been notably higher of late. And needless to say Beck is not the phenom he was a year ago, merely by dint of the country becoming more familiar with him.

But it's probably also worth noting, just in the context of this January, that the month was dominated by hard news, in the form of the Giffords shooting.

Glenn Beck is many things but he is not hard news (nor does he generally attempt to be). And considering the nature of the news, perhaps it's not entirely surprising that viewers were clicking away for a while. Sometimes it's nice to be told the world is not ending.

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