OPINION
Premium

MSNBC Sees Its Audience Disappear

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Nov 12, 2024
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Get access to Brad Slager's "Riffed From the Headlines," a daily VIP feature where he looks to bring accountability to the mainstream media. Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.

Demo-lition Project – MSNBC

  • No one watches the postgame show after a loss.

In the post-election doldrums for the Democrats, the liberal freakout and the media shock come together in a ratings reality that slams the (formerly) favorite cable outlet of the left. On election night, MSNBC had turned some heads when it posted a robust 6 million viewers number and beat out CNN, at 5.1 million, in a surprising upset. (Fox News meanwhile saw in excess of 10.4 million.) But since Kamala’s loss, MSNBC’s viewers have fled.

In the Wednesday-Friday stretch of November 6th, 7th, and 8th, MSNBC saw more than half its audience flee. In drawing just around 800,000 for total day, that represented a loss from the same dates in 2023 of over 50%. The Friday total of 636,000 made for the lowest non-holiday viewing day of the year. CNN, with a smaller audience saw less of a drop off of 26% year-over-year. Meanwhile, Fox News was seeing an audience average over 4.3 million during that three-day span which was a 58% rise from 2023.

Reporting on the Mirror – CNN

Recommended

No Circular Firing Squads This Time, Republicans Kurt Schlichter
Conservatives Disagree On Yellowstone’s ‘Woke’ Ending Scott Morefield

  • Will their audience even notice?

It was mere weeks ago when we covered that CNN was looking over the new contracts for its talent and was mostly going through a salary freeze. Included in those affected was Chris Wallace, who was slated to take a pay cut, given he was initially hired for the ill-fated CNN+ venture and had been off the air for much of his tenure before netting a lightly regarded Sunday show.

Well, news was announced now that Wallace is leaving the network and will strike out on the independent circuit, doing streaming and podcasting under his own banner.

Meanwhile, Dylan Byers reports that now with the election over, CNN is poised to go through another bout of massive layoffs, with on-air figures likely involved.

Gilded Reframe – MSNBC

  • You know that guy he called the worst human on the planet? He’s actually not so bad…

Oh, Joe Scarborough – how nice it must be to go through life with no foundational principles and nobody willing to make you accountable for your positions. Well, Scar-Joe is at it again, as the man who platformed Donald Trump’s political campaign in 2016, and then spent the bulk of the past years demonizing the man, now comes out after the election to take a more complimentary position toward the president-elect.

BlueAnon – DAILY BEAST

  • Like Socialism, true Russian collusion conspiracies have not been tried yet!

As the press continues to flail about after the Trump landslide, we get this dose of amusement from Daily Beast journo Julia Davis. She has some disturbing details to share: Trump is indebted to Vladimir Putin for being helped to the election victory!

What makes this so funny is not just that she is desperate to regenerate the vacuous Russian collusion scandal, but what she cites as proof of this claim. Davis points to a top-level Putin operative quoted in TASS, saying Trump now has obligations to fulfill. 

This means that in order to make this charge that Trump is listening to Moscow, Julia is listening to the reporting seen in the state-run Russian propaganda machine.

Pulitzer Prize Nomination – THE WRAP

  • Celebrity micturating storage details are must-know information!

Look, we get that outlets love to break stories and to be the first to have an exclusive. But…there is something to be said about the content of said stories as well. We dare say here at RFTH that there are reasons to tout truly moving stories – but those concerning bodily movements not so much.

There is a huge holiday release coming up in theaters, the Amazon-MGM production “Red One,” starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. Back in April, the outlet had reported that The Rock had some on set issues that were creating problems for the production. Well, Dwayne was recently on a podcast and he confirmed something that had been in the original piece: He was, in fact, urinating into water bottles while on set:

Dwayne Johnson admitted to peeing in bottles and being late to set while working on “Red One,” over six months after TheWrap first broke the story. In an interview with GQ out Monday, Johnson backed exclusive reporting from TheWrap back in April that he’d made waves on the Amazon set of the upcoming Christmas movie by urinating in bottles and being chronically late. “I pee in a bottle,” he said. “Yeah. That happens.”

This confirmation is apparently a HUGE development for the trade outlet, as founder and CEO Sharon Waxman was proudly boasting this vital reporting had been confirmed.