Crash and Burn

We talked yesterday about CNN and MSNBC, the biggest purveyors of fake news and bullshit in the history of the media. I’ve been saying for some time that eventually people would figure it out, the ones with a brain anyway, and their ratings would tank. Their day has apparently come.

MSNBC averaged only 847,000 viewers during the second quarter and CNN settled for a dismal 654,000. By comparison, Fox News averaged 1.2 million during the same time period to finish No. 1 in all of basic cable. CNN failed to crack the one-million viewer threshold during the prime-time hours of 8-11 p.m. ET, while MSNBC lost to CNN among the key demographic of adults age 25-54.

Multiple MSNBC programs had their worst quarterly performances in years among the critical category that advertisers covet. 

“The 11th Hour with Brian Williams” had its lowest-rated quarter in the demo ever, “The Rachel Maddow Show” had its worst demo since the second quarter of 2016, “All In with Chris Hayes” had its worst demo performance since the fourth quarter of 2016, and “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” “Morning Joe” and “MTP Daily” with Chuck Todd all had their smallest audience in the demo since the fourth quarter of 2015.  They are trying so desperately to keep Trump as the boogeyman but that ship has sailed on them. And they are stuck with a border crisis, a dementia riddled president, and Nancy Pelosi drinking more vodka every day to try and deal with The Squad.

DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall feels that logistical and cyclical issues such as cord-cutting and coronavirus exhaustion could have impacted viewership but thinks the problems are largely content based – and he’s right.

“CNN and MSNBC are particularly aggressive in their progressive approaches to news and only true believers want news solely from an ideological standpoint. There still needs to be some intellectual honesty in the approach to journalism, and audiences are sensing that CNN and MSNBC have become too shrill for measured reporting,” McCall said in a recent Fox News interview. Too shrill. That’s saying it lightly.

Hard to feel sorry for them – they made their bed, enjoy the lumps.

Author note: portions of this article come from an interview Jeffrey McCall gave to Fox News.