Where did MSNBC’s audience go?
I’ve been watching cable news ratings for a long time and I have never seen anything like this before.
Up to, and including the earlier part of, 2024, MSNBC was doing fine. While not at the levels of Fox News (which wins in no small part because, by presenting the conservative side of issues, it has so little competition), MSNBC had a strong viewer base, and was doing a good deal better than the dropping-through-a-trap-door numbers at CNN.
But now? Take a look at the latest ratings for weekday and weekend prime time among the key demographic of 18-54 year olds:
WEEKDAY
WEEKEND
This is not bad. It is not even awful. This is total collapse.
Here is how Glenn Greenwald, whose tweet is where I got the above data, sees things:
There are many reasons for this. But obviously if people put their faith in a network’s personalities who keep telling them Trump is Hitler, his evil is manifest to all, he’s going to jail, only to see he win easily, of course you’ll stop trusting them and feel hopeless.
Mr. Greenwald is one of the growing number of leftward media people who have abandoned the increasingly lunatic-fringe “woke” crowd because it has gone so far to the extreme. I don’t know if he is correct in his analysis. But I do know that the numbers are what they are. And for MSNBC (along with CNN) those numbers are disastrous.
What does it tell us about the country? Is it shifting to the right? Is it exactly where it has been, but increasingly removed from where the “woke” left is going? Is it just fed up to here with their hatreds and intolerances? Is it a combination of these factors? Something else?
I don’t pretend to know the answer. But I do know that if I were working at MSNBC, whether in front of or behind the cameras, I’d be damn scared about my future.
Stay tuned.
