MSNBC continues to struggle in ratings competition with Fox News, which isn't news. What is news, it seems to me, is that Franco is still dead, as "SNL" used to report weekly, and MSNBC, by and large, is still up to its same old tricks. There must be an anti-inspiration poster in every MSNBC executive office that reads, "Innovation Kills."
I see little of MSNBC's programming these days, a viewing habit now matched by hordes of others. But I've seen enough to write this column. And I do enjoy following the ratings game, that monthly contest of cable-news competitors butting heads. According to Adweek — brace! — there's still one ram and two sheep.
In October, Fox News won and MSNBC placed. (CNN showed.) Again, there's nothing eye-popping about those ratings results, which, again, seems to be oddly newsworthy. The internals reveal far more.
From September to October, MSNBC lost 5% of its primetime audience and 5% as well in total viewers. The network's coveted 25-54 age demo "represent[ed] the network’s smallest audience in the daypart since 2004." Fox's primetime audience was double that of MSNBC's and more than 3x larger overall. (Anecdotally, in public venues with TV screens I almost always see Fox, never MSNBC.)
In primetime, the "liberal network" will take another hit sometime next year, when star-host Rachel Maddow eases herself out of her regular 9 p.m. slot to appear, perhaps, only one night a week. She'll participate in other NBC projects. Rumors had it that she would instead launch her own media venture, but it seems a steady paycheck won out.
Overall and right now, though, MSNBC is hurting. What's peculiar is that I find virtually no reporting on the reasons why, excluding the usual stuff of "Trump is gone, thus left-leaning viewers have lost interest."
That, and the even more commonplace media observation of Democratic despair: Republican gerrymandering will almost certainly retake the House; Dems' slim Senate majority is quite possibly in inescapable danger; and in the next presidential contest there looms Republican election subversion — all of which has MSNBC viewers clocking in as ex-viewers, groaning beyond hope.
Which will be disastrously self-fulfilling, of course, unless Dem viewers and voters shake off their despair and get mad — enthusiastically mad and organizationally engaged.
But back to MSNBC and its slipping viewership, to which I'll add two other causations, extracted from my not inconsiderable media background (I worked for years in both commercial and public radio).
One is that each MSNBC hour is essentially, even exactly, the preceding hour in news content. Watch any morning program and you've preemptively seen every afternoon and pretty much every evening program. Informationwise, there's really no reason to tune in more than one hour at most. Daily content is never-changing, as are the network's guests. MSNBC's ideological slant flatlines throughout, and the pounding monotony of it all is numbing to anyone intrigued by controversy instead.
For sure, this makes for tons of programming on the cheap. Yet one is bound to wonder if the tradeoff — low and lower ratings and thus lower ad revenue — is actually worth it. The network likely employs a dozen or so MBAs who parsimoniously count the network's chickens and their payoff eggs, but such is the same mindset that has costly streaming services gobbling up free, legacy television.
My advice to MSNBC execs would be to at least mix things up ideologically — not, heaven forfend, by inviting Trumpian pols on-air, whose scripts are as predictable as Rep. Jayapal's, but by hosting reasonably sane, centrist-to-center-right personalities. Give controversy a chance.
My second suggestion contradicts only in a minor way with my criticism of MSNBC's stultifying sameness every hour, its basic lack of innovation. The network has tweaked the sameness somewhat, although its tweaking is baffling. A certain amount of block programming — in MSNBC's case, discrete hours aimed mostly at particular ethnicities — has entered the lineup. This is unhelpful and it should stop.
While the same issues are still mostly out front, Joy Reid has a Black Hour and José Díaz-Balart has a Latino Hour. I'd wager both will soon be gone; I'm at loss as to why they ever appeared. Block programming interferes with any broadcaster's overall programming "image," its market "positioning" — which can be, and usually is, damaging.
Diaz-Balart works immigration issues into each of his hours, something of supreme interest to only a small slice of MSNBC viewers. Others bail. What's more, in addition to catering largely to a Black audience, Ms. Reid is so ideologically over-the-top, only the most committed leftists could tolerate her bombastic ways. In October her ratings, unsurprisingly, continued their downward march.
However much of a disappearance act is occurring among the once-cable-news inclined, something must nevertheless present itself against the rightist, doctrinaire bullshit spewed daily on Fox News. Wouldn't it be nice if MSNBC, then, were to present itself more responsibly, more reasonably and more intelligently?