Things are not great over at MSNBC right now. Rumors are swirling about a spinoff and possible sale of the network after NBC separates it from the company’s other assets. Both fans and co-workers have had a lot to say publicly about Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski sitting down with President Trump, and most concerningly of all, there’s the ratings, which have been horrible since the election.
Actually, horrible might be an unfortunate understatement. Rachel Maddow just put up her worst ratings of the year. According to The Independent, she lost in the 25-54 demographic to a rerun of Bob’s Burgers on Adult Swim. The story is similarly bad for Morning Joe, which has seen double digit ratings drops of its own, per The Daily Mail. Altogether, the network has apparently lost nearly half its total viewers since the election. Nearly half! Never one to shy away from gloating, Fox News put out a press release that included a whole section on MSNBC shows it claims have hit all-time lows since the election.
Clearly, no one would say the last few weeks have gone well, but historical post-election trends are allowing some to stay optimistic. Cable news networks that are perceived to have an ideological lean tend to do worse immediately after elections in which their preferred party performs poorly. MSNBC saw a dip in its ratings after President Trump’s victory in 2016, and Fox News saw a similar dip after President Biden’s victory in 2020. A source at MSNBC reportedly told The Daily Beast they expected this dip after the election, and they think ratings will rise again once President Trump is officially sworn in after the holidays.
But will enough people return? I’ve got some concerns.
The Washington Post spoke to many liberal leaning voters for a recent article in which they talked about avoiding the news right now because there’s just too much negativity. Many are frustrated with the state of the world and don’t want to ride the daily highs and lows. Some level of that is human nature, and history showed that many tuned back in during President Trump’s first term, as his unconventional style fed the cable news plenty of topics to discuss.
We’ve all been down this road before, however, and there’s a good chance people may not respond to a second Trump Presidency in the same way they did the first. Some of his recent Cabinet picks have attracted a lot of outrage, and that hasn’t led to an increase in viewership. Even a show like Saturday Night Live, which couldn't have leaned harder into Trump in 2016, seems likely to pull back at least a little bit on politics moving forward.
In addition, the overall viewership trends of Americans are a lot less friendly to cable news networks than they were in 2016. Yes, cutting the cord and switching to streaming was a thing back then, but it was only last year that the number of households streaming finally surpassed those using cable and satellite. That’s only going to get worse moving forward, as less total people will have access to MSNBC.
In addition, there’s also a chance here that these ratings numbers create a vicious cycle with NBC’s decision to spin off the network. Sometimes when subsidiaries go through a rough patch, their parent company takes the long game approach and provides them with consistent or even more resources to help them get back on the right path. That’s far from a guarantee right now with so much up in the air. We don’t know if NBC is going to want to sell the business (Elon Musk has joked about buying it), but if they do, they’ll likely want to make it as profitable as possible, which could involve cutting resources, not adding.
I have no idea what’s going to happen with MSNBC moving forward. I expect ratings will bounce back a bit after the new year, but exactly how much they’ll bounce back is an open question. Maybe this will follow the pattern we’ve seen before, and liberal viewers will return to cable news and more specifically, MSNBC as they re-engage. Or maybe many of them will stay away, either because they want to avoid the news for longer or because there are other, more modern ways they’re going to get their news moving forward. We’ll see.
