(Washington Free Beacon) Donald Trump’s first term as president was the best thing that ever happened to MSNBC. The Democratic-aligned cable news channel enjoyed record ratings between 2017 and 2020 as anxious #Resistance liberals tuned in for group therapy sessions hosted by Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and other anti-Trump commentators whose increasingly unhinged rhetoric mirrored the deteriorating mental health of their viewers. But after four years of saggingratings under President Joe Biden, amid a media landscape that has changed dramatically since 2016, there is reason to doubt that MSNBC and its roster of relentlessly partisan grievance-mongers can repeat that success in Trump’s second term. A more pressing question: Can the network even survive in its current form?
In the days since the election, MSNBC’s ratings haven’t seen a “Trump bump”—they’ve cratered. More on that shortly. But the ratings collapse comes as MSNBC—with its increasingly ugly rhetoric, denigration of Trump supporters, and ethically challenged hosts—has emerged as a major headache for parent company Comcast, much as Fox News Channel was a perennial problem for its then-parent company, 21st Century Fox, or CNN was for its then-owner, Time Warner, in Trump’s first term. Furthermore, MSNBC’s harsh partisanship is increasingly seen as a drag on its sister news operation, the supposedly nonpartisan NBC News, which is dogged by allegations of liberal bias and continues to draw fewer viewers than rival ABC News.
Comcast’s recent comments that it’s considering spinning off its portfolio of cable channels suggest that the company’s owners, the billionaire Roberts family, would like to rid themselves of MSNBC, and the accompanying bad publicity, once and for all. It is, after all, “a declining asset.” After averaging 1.1 million viewers in the month of October, MSNBC’s rating declined more than 30 percent last week in the days following Trump’s election. During the primetime hours of 8-11 p.m.—when advertising rates are the highest—the network’s ratings plummeted more than 50 percent. NBCUniversal put out a press release boasting that, for the first time in history, MSNBC had more viewers on Election Night than CNN, even though many attributed those numbers to gleeful conservatives tuning in to gawk at the left-wing pundits experiencing public meltdowns. Not to mention the fact that CNN was also experiencing a historic ratings collapse in the Biden era.
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(Collin Anderson/X)
Days before the election, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh announced the company was exploring the option of spinning off its struggling cable networks—which include MSNBC and CNBC as well as Bravo, E!, and Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen—into a separate entity. Comcast’s stock price jumped, an apparent confirmation that many investors indeed view these cable networks as declining assets. MSNBC in particular, with its reputation for partisan hysteria, looks increasingly like a tainted liability that company executives would be wise to jettison. Puck‘s Dylan Byers, often regarded as a pliant mouthpiece for corporate titans who revels in layoffs and pours salt in the wounds of declining news organizations, described Cavanagh’s announcement as “the latest reminder that several of the media institutions that played starring roles in Trump’s first term might not be up for it this time around.”
In an article headlined “The #Resistance Is Futile,” Byers ran through the various reasons why MSNBC might not have “the muscle or momentum to return to its old, occasionally shrill form.” The former Politico scribe, best known for helping ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos preempt a Washington Free Beaconreport on his donations to the Clinton Foundation, explained that MSNBC’s most popular host, Rachel Maddow, works just one night a week despite signing a massive new contract worth $30 million per year. Byers observed that Maddow’s colleagues at the network “increasingly seem to be influencing no one other than themselves and about a million or so liberals with AARP cards.” The Free Beaconcan confirm that elderly whites—who shelled out thousands of dollars for tickets—were disproportionately represented at the MSNBC “democracy” festival in Brooklyn two months ago. (NBC nepo baby Luke Russert hosted the event.)
MSNBC is hardly the only liberal media outlet struggling to confront this grim reality. CNN is reportedly planning to fire “hundreds” of employees and scale back on ludicrously exorbitant anchor salaries (who is “John Berman” and why does he make more than $1 million a year?) in an effort to cut costs and divert more resources to its digital operations to restore its once-respectable brand. The beleaguered Washington Post conducted a round of layoffs in 2023, a year in which the publication posted a loss of nearly $80 million. The Post‘s traffic has dropped 60 percent since its peak in April 2020, when lefty readers flocked to the website in droves for anti-Trump COVID updates.
But there is reason to believe that MSNBC is uniquely ill-suited to bounce back in the post-Biden era. The network’s top personalities exude all of the traits many Democrats argue have caused the party to lose touch with normal Americans. Sneering condescension. Inscrutable woke vocabulary. A tendency to embrace bizarre conspiracy theories and view every political problem through the lens of patriarchal white supremacy. The MSNBC stable of “talent” is rife with individuals tainted by scandal of some kind. Let’s take a look, shall we?
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(YouTube)
Rachel Maddow
