Another reason to have a la carte cable TV. It would flush channels like MSNBC away faster then you can say "ratings", since few would pick it. Every cable customer is subsidizing dud channels that few watch. Before Al Gore's Current TV finally went off the air, it had many shows where there wouldn't even be 30,000 people tuning in. Even liberals weren't watching and they couldn't even sell ads! The only value that it had was that it was carried by most cable providers. The Arabs of course ditched the whole lineup for its own lineup of crap.
Meanwhile channels that would be huge, (like Beck's network) never get on many cable systems. The cable providers bias for liberal channel would be broken too. And it would lower Discovery's hold on the cable business too (they use the handful of it's popular channels to force channels few want), as customers could ditch it's lame channels.
Remember how hard it was to get Fox News a decade ago?