With monthly ratings due, some numbers have started to come out and the story appears to be CNN's prime time ratings, which Daily Finance calls "dizzying year-over-year drops" compared the big 2008 election season.

The New York Times' Bill Carter reports that CNN will be last in prime time, placing behind Fox News, MSNBC, and HLN, and writes:

Individually, the CNN shows were beaten resoundingly by all the Fox News programs, but also lost to all of the MSNBC programs, including a repeat of Keith Olbermann's 8 p.m. edition of "Countdown," which beat the 10 p.m. hour of CNN’s signature prime-time program, "Anderson Cooper 360." Again that was a first.

The network said in a statement, "CNN's ratings are always going to be more dependent on the news environment, much more so than opinion-based programming especially in prime time."

Those numbers were all based on ratings through last Thursday. We now have Friday's ratings, and CNN was again in 4th place in the prime time A25-54 demo.

TVNewser will have full reports tomorrow.