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Following President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory on Nov. 5, media observers expected the cable news networks to reap a “Trump Bump” ratings boost similar to what they enjoyed in 2016 after his improbable win over Hillary Clinton.
But this time around, we’ve seen the opposite result: The Donald Drain.
At MSNBC, the home of the most unhinged commentary and analysis we’ve ever seen in the history of television — and that’s saying something — more than half its audience, 53%, is no longer tuning in, compared to October’s ratings.
“The Rachel Maddow Show,” for example, easily MSNBC’s top-rated program though it only airs once a week, drew just 1.3 million viewers on Nov. 10, five days after the election — a drop of 1 million viewers from the month before.
In the key 25-54 demographic that advertisers most covet, Maddow’s number marked the smallest audience her show has seen since April 2022.
For context, Sean Hannity’s Fox News program in the same time slot brought in more than 3.1 million total viewers, or nearly triple Maddow’s that day. In the 25-54 demo, Hannity nearly quadrupled her, with 420,000 viewers to her meager 109,000.
And here’s where the really bad news comes in for the executives at 30 Rock: Outside of Maddow, MSNBC has seen an unprecedented plunge.
Example: On Tuesday, Nov. 11, one week after the election, MSNBC attracted its lowest 25-54 demo ratings in 23 years. Over on CNN, the demo number was the lowest it has seen since June 27, 2000 — when Bill Clinton was president.
For the overall week of Nov. 6 through 13, Fox News averaged 2.23 million viewers, while MSNBC attracted a paltry 557,000 and CNN just 399,000.
In fact, Fox News (where I serve as a contributor) saw its viewership jump by 38% overall since Nov. 5, after dominating election night by topping all networks in drawing more than 10 million viewers.
It’s so bad that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski crawled to Mar-a-Lago Friday to kiss Trump’s ring — drawing scorn for their utter shamelessness after years of on-air attacks.
The ratings underscore just how niche these leftist networks have become. According to Pew Research, just 9% of CNN viewers and 3% of MSNBC’s audience identify as Republican.
So why the sudden viewer rejection?
Maybe they feel betrayed and misled after years of being told that Trump was Hitler, a fascist, a racist, a sexist xenophobe who had to be stopped or Democracy would cease to exist.
Yet his actual victory showed that most of the country doesn’t buy it — not even President Biden, who welcomed Trump to the White House with a big smile last week.
These viewers were exposed only to polls showing the hapless Kamala Harris leading the key swing states. CNN, for instance, had her up 6 percentage points over Trump in Wisconsin, 5 points in Michigan and tied in Pennsylvania in its last polls before Election Day.
She lost all three — and is behind in the popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes.
Or maybe it’s just fatigue. This election cycle, with its assassination attempts, its Democratic coup and the historic return of a former president, has been the craziest anyone can remember. Maybe some folks just need a break.
Maybe other CNN and MSNBC viewers are simply too depressed with the outcome to tune in.
So will their anchors, hosts and analysts pivot away from playing the perpetual resistance to Trump?
CNN provides one answer:
“We’ve seen people today, our fellow reporters, crying and hugging in the hallways,” legal correspondent Paula Reid reported after Trump nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general.
Wait. Why would serious and objective reporters be crying, exactly?
Did Walter Cronkite cry when Richard Nixon won twice? Did Tim Russert cry when George W. Bush won a nail-biter over Al Gore?
Over at MSNBC, meanwhile, Joy Reid is spewing her same old rhetoric post-election.
“Don’t think because you have a green card and came through the ‘right way’ — if you’re brown, you may not stick around,” Reid said on her Nov. 14 broadcast.
In other words, she’s claiming Trump will deport those in the country legally. This is insanity.
No: Until the culture and talent changes at these networks — and, by extension, at outlets like The New York Times, which employs exactly zero pro-Trump columnists — the chances of audiences returning, in a media landscape filled with more options than ever before, will continue to decline.
So expect things to get worse. CNN’s ratings “Trump slump” will lead to massive layoffs. MSNBC will likely be spun off from its parent company Comcast as its value continues to nosedive.
And they have only themselves to blame.
Joe Concha is the author of “Progressively Worse: Why Today’s Democrats Ain’t Your Daddy’s Donkeys.”
English (US)