Metaphorically speaking, one would prefer a dramatic hemorrhage, but perhaps the establishment media will slowly bleed to death instead.
MSNBC, the pro-establishment outlet and perennial Democratic Party mouthpiece, debuted or relaunched four shows between Saturday and Tuesday.
In short, it has not gone well.
For instance, Jen Psaki, former press secretary in then-President Joe Biden’s White House, premiered this week as host of “The Briefing,” which has replaced “The Rachel Maddow Show” Tuesday through Friday during the crucial 9 p.m. EST slot, according to Fox News.
Incredibly, from her Tuesday debut to her second show on Wednesday, Psaki lost the majority of her most coveted viewers. After drawing 139,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic on Tuesday, she drew only 65,000 such viewers Wednesday. That represents an astonishing 53 percent decline.
Likewise, Psaki’s overall viewership also fell from 1.2 million to slightly more than one million.
According to Fox, on Wednesday, viewers aged 25-54 relegated Psaki’s brand-new show to 39th place among all cable news programs.
One possible explanation for Psaki’s immediate failure leaps to mind. It involves rats abandoning the proverbial sinking ship.
Biden himself has chosen this week to resurface, resulting in several calamitous interviews.
Have you ever watched MSNBC?
Meanwhile, Thursday on CNN, conservative commentator Scott Jennings predicted that the upcoming release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” would hit the Democratic Party like a “nuclear bomb.”
In other words, Democrat viewers might prefer to avoid anyone with connections to the Biden White House.
But that does not explain why significantly more viewers tuned in to Psaki on Tuesday than on Wednesday.
Nor does it explain the dreadful performances of MSNBC’s other reworked offerings.
According to the marketing news outlet Adweek, “The Weekend,” which launched Saturday morning with a brand-new lineup of personalities, suffered a 27 percent overall decline in viewership from the previous week, as well as a 44 percent decline in the 25-54 demographic.
The new “The Weekend: Primetime,” which also debuted Saturday, declined 19 percent overall and 39 percent in the key demographic.
Finally, Monday’s debut of “The Weeknight” attracted 819,000 overall viewers and only 78,000 aged 25-54. The demographic viewership actually represented a four percent increase, but the overall number of viewers amounted to a nine percent decrease.
Aside from the poor performance overall, the dominant impression those figures leave is the astonishingly advanced age of the average MSNBC news consumer.
For instance, “The Weeknight” attracted 819,000 viewers overall but only 78,000 aged 25-54.
Psaki, of course, had an even more dramatic imbalance. Of her one million-plus overall viewers on Wednesday, only 65,000 fell between the ages of 25 and 54.
This suggests a slow bleed. Cable news cannot survive demographic numbers like that in the long run.
Network executives might convince themselves otherwise. To soothe their fears, they might dream of viewers in the 25-to-54 demographic gravitating toward cable news as they age. But that seems highly unlikely in an age when social media has already supplanted traditional television as the preferred (because it’s more reliable) source of news for millions of Americans.
In short, it might take a generation or so, but the demise of the establishment media appears certain.
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