MSNBC’s Ratings Continue To Slide, As Viewers Vote With Their Remote

Its obsessive coverage of the Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) leadership vote and the “civil war” in the Republican Party put MSNBC’s viewership on a downward slide last week, according to the latest Nielsen ratings.

Just one MSNBC show broke into the top five programs on basic cable last week, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which rated number four.

The rest of the top five shows belonged to Fox News: “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” “The Five,” “Hannity,” and “The Ingraham Angle.”

Although MSNBC finished the week of May 10 as the number two network in basic cable, its prime time audience shrunk by 15,000 viewers, and its all day viewership declined by 17,000 compared to the previous week. The left-wing network also shed 8,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, the age group coveted by advertisers for its disposable income.

Ratings-starved CNN gained a mere 1%, enough to rank fourth on basic cable behind Fox News, MSNBC, and the home improvement and real estate network HGTV.

Fox News Channel, meanwhile, continued its briefly interrupted domination of cable news in a stronger position than the previous week.

After seeing its 19-year-long reign as the top-rated cable news network come to an end on January 6, Fox has returned to the top spot in cable news for the last 13 straight weeks.

Fox News’ prime time viewership crept upward from 2.2 million to 2.3 million last week, according to Adweek’s TV Newser.

FNC also saw its grip on the 25-54 demographic increase to 369,000 viewers last week, up from 343,000 during the week of May 3.

Cable’s most popular show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” saw its audience grow to 3.2 million people. That represents a gain of 300,000 people over the previous week, and 62,000 among the most coveted demographic.

While MSNBC and CNN focused endlessly on the Cheney drama and news about the January 6 Capitol riots, Tucker Carlson reported on immigration — a subject 43% of Americans say the media have not spent enough time covering, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll — as well as President Joe Biden’s tanking economy, the return of lines at gas stations, and parents outraged by sexually explicit materials replacing the classics in public school curricula.

The late-night Fox News comedy-commentary show “Gutfeld” won its time slot last week with 1.6 million viewers — more than network “comedy” shows like “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

Fox’s winning streak continued into the weekend, as CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter drew less than half the viewership of Fox News’ “MediaBuzz,” which focuses on media bias.

“Chubby Checker’s 1963 hit ‘How Low Can You Go?’ was about the limbo, but it could double as Stelter’s theme music these days,” remarked a clearly satisfied Fox News.

MSNBC rebounded a bit on Monday, as Nicolle Wallace’s “Deadline: White House” won the 4 p.m. (Eastern) time slot; otherwise, Fox won every cable match-up of the day.

The ratings of all cable news shows have dropped precipitously since President Donald Trump left office, but MSNBC and CNN have found themselves hardest hit.

“Bit by bit, the Trump gold rush slowed to a trickle, and people began to break their cable news addictions,” reports Joe Pompeo in the June issue of Vanity Fair. “There were, after all, plenty of other things to watch.”

Pompeo quotes Variety magazine’s analysis that “the left-leaning networks will have to rely on politicians making the occasional gaffe and just get used to the post-Trump slump.”

Or they could correct the story selection, tone, and bias that have a growing number of Americans tuning them out.

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