O’DONNELL WALKOUT BOOSTS MORGAN’S RATINGS

Piers Morgan is likely to have concluded that Christine O’Donnell’s decision to walk out on him during an interview Wednesday night was, as the English would say, “brilliant.” O’Donnell’s appearance on the show boosted his ratings 7 percent on Wednesday and created an avalanche of publicity. CNN posted a video of the walkout on its own website and made it available to other sites as well. It quickly went viral on YouTube, which recorded nearly a quarter of a million views. The walkout was a prime topic of posts on Facebook and tweets on Twitter. Ratings were not yet available for Thursday’s show in which Morgan discussed his walkout with “Bat Out of Hell” singer Meat Loaf, then went on to ask him about his opinion of the debt crisis. But the incident was almost certain to give the show a much-needed boost. According to Nielsen, Morgan’s audience has fallen to just 695,000. He was trounced Wednesday night by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC with 921,000 viewers and Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel with 2.27 million viewers.