It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle

MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election.

“The ReidOut” has shed 47% of its total audience, averaging just 759,000 viewers after averaging 1.4 million viewers throughout 2024 leading up to Election Day, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Reid lost even more viewers among the advertiser-coveted demographic ages 25-54, losing a whopping 52% of them, now averaging only 76,000 key demo viewers.

Reid’s MSNBC primetime colleagues have also suffered devastating losses in viewership over the past month. The network’s primetime lineup has lost a whopping 53% in total viewers, averaging at 621,000, and an astonishing 61% of viewers in the key demo, averaging 57,000.

MSNBC’s biggest star, Rachel Maddow, who is only on-air Mondays, went from averaging 2.4 million total viewers leading up to the election to averaging just 1.4 million, a 43% drop. Her viewership drop among viewers in the key demo is more drastic, having lost 56% of them, averaging 103,000. Maddow is MSNBC’s only primetime host to maintain six-digit viewership in the key demo.

I will admit it: though I almost never watch MSNBC, or any of the other cable news networks, or television news at all — I’m mostly deaf, and watching live TV, even with closed captioning^[1]Closed captioning on delayed shows ranges from fair to good, but on live broadcasts it is really terrible., is difficult for me — but I did tune into Morning Joe the day after the election, after I heard that Donald Trump was winning, just to hear the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Schadenfreude!

And it seems that the MSNBC hosts are not happy with each other:

MSNBC descends into civil war as Rachel Maddow turns on Morning Joe hosts for ‘bending knee’ to Trump

By James Cirrone | Daily Mail | Monday, December 2, 2024 | 10:02 AM EST | Updated: Tuesday, December 3, 2024 | 8:18 AM EST

Source: Twitter. I do not vouch for its veracity. There is nothing in the credentialed media to verify this, but it is amusing. This was not part of the Daily Mail story.

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow is reportedly furious with her Morning Joe colleagues for meeting with Donald Trump after he won the presidential election.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited the president-elect a little over two weeks ago at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to ‘restart communications’ and set a ‘new approach’ ahead of his second term.

Maddow, along with other hosts at the troubled liberal network, are calling this move by the married Morning Joe co-hosts ‘opportunistic,’ according to a report in The US Sun.

‘The meeting at Mar-a-Lago created a lot of tension in the teams, and many other stars…see both Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski as opportunistic and with very low self respect and forgetting their values of being journalists with independence and integrity,’ said a journalist who’s worked at MSNBC for 15 years.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the journalist made it clear who has a problem with Morning Joe pivoting from calling Trump a fascist and an admirer of Adolf Hitler to having a cordial meeting with him to figure out coverage going forward.

‘They have lost a lot of credibility. Rachel Maddow is pissed at them as are other presenters like Chris Hayes and Ari Melber. They are so frustrated,’ the journalist said.

MSNBC disputed this report, claiming that Maddow hasn’t said anything on air or off air about Scarborough and Brzezinski meeting with Trump.

‘Any insinuation otherwise is merely speculative,’ an MSNBC spokesperson told The US Sun.

I have previously mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch for his tirade over Mr and Mrs Scarborough, who at least claim to be journalists, going to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow being “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, absent divine intervention, Donald Trump will be the next President, and that means he is and will be newsworthy for the next four years.

I would have thought that journolists, oops, sorry, journalists like Miss Maddow and Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who they don’t like and who doesn’t like or respect them.

And it seems that Morning Joe hasn’t dropped quite as much as the other MSNBC shows:

As reported by Mediaite, during the week of the announcement (of the visit to Mar-a-Lago), Morning Joe averaged 691,000 total viewers, which was only a 1.7% decline from the previous week’s average of 703,000. That said, both weeks were down a lot from the show’s previous quarter average of 1.14 million viewers.

Despite this, Morning Joe hasn’t dropped as much as other MSNBC shows. Between the third quarter (pre-election and Trump meeting) and November, Morning Joe lost 14% of its audience. In comparison, the network’s prime-time 9 pm hour hosted by Alex Wagner (and Rachel Maddow on Mondays) was down 32%.

In addition, Chris Hayes was down 15%, Joy Reid 30%, and Lawrence O’Donnell 24%. Nicolle Wallace, the usual ratings leader for the network, was also down some 14%.

News networks, in general, are down post-election, with MSNBC down 47% and CNN down 33%. On the week of the Trump meeting announcement, even Fox News saw a small 9% dip. Meanwhile, in prime time, MSNBC lost 52% of its viewers, while CNN dropped 39%.

Freedom of Speech and of the Press carries with it the freedom to read or watch, or not read or watch, and it seems that more people are exercising their freedom not to read or watch the liberal networks. CNN, which at least purports to be unbiased, despite the fact that it leans significantly to the left, has lost less than MSNBC.

However, the statement that the news networks, in general, are down subsequent to the election, isn’t true one place: the conservative-leaning Fox News Network. The New York Times reported, the week after the election, that “Prime-time viewership at MSNBC has fallen 53 percent from October, and jumped 21 percent on Fox News.” AdWeek, which is a non-political source, reported:

The culmination of the 2024 presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump resulted in big numbers for Fox News and audience erosion for MSNBC and CNN.

Trump’s win was a big boon for FNC as it commanded the largest cable news share in its history with 62% of the cable news audience across total day. It was the most-watched network on Election Night and during the vice president’s concession speech the following day. Fox News was also the only network that grew in total viewers primetime and total day.

Meanwhile, the CNN and MSNBC crowd largely tuned out following the election, with both networks registering double-digit drops in total viewers during primetime and total day compared to October.

All three networks did see better numbers in the advertiser-coveted demo of Adults 25-54 during primetime compared to the previous month. On the other hand, MSNBC was the only network that posted losses in the demo during total day.

The story does not tell us that the viewers who deserted CNN and MSNBC are the same viewers who migrated to Fox, but it is obvious that more people are interested in news about our former and now future President, perhaps from a source that isn’t just repeating the same old pre-election “he’s a fascist” meme. The Washington Post lost a ton of subscribers following owner Jeff Bezos’ decision not to have the newspaper endorse Kamale Harris Emhoff before the election, subscriptions that I assume were primarily from politically liberal readers, which makes it yet another liberally-oriented credentialed media source which has lost readership.

Is it possible that our friends on the left just don’t want news if it’s bad news, bad news at least to them? Is it possible that they prefer journolism to journalism?