After Mueller Report's Conclusion, MSNBC Ratings Take Nosedive
Before President Donald Trump was sworn into office, the mainstream media lambasted him over unsubstantiated allegations of collusion between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government.
Chief among those who pushed the Russian conspiracy theory was MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, whose editorials garnered her a spike in viewers that equated to the highest ratings she had ever seen.
After two years of media speculation and a special counsel investigation, Robert Mueller submitted his final report on March 22, and Attorney General William Barr summarized the “principle conclusions” in a letter to Congress two days later. There was no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
And just like that, Maddow’s stellar ratings plummeted over the week following the final report, according to Fox News.
Comparing viewership ratings for “The Rachel Maddow Show” from the first part of the week before to the first part of the week after the submission of the Mueller report, the MSNBC host lost an average of 13 percent of her viewers.
Maddow lost roughly 500,000 viewers alone on the Monday after Barr published Mueller’s “no collusion” conclusion, as compared to the Monday just one week before.
She suffered a 15 percent decline during that period in viewership among the key demographic of adults age 25-52, a highly coveted segment of viewers that drive advertising dollars and network revenue.
While Maddow arguably took the biggest hit, the damage to viewership and ratings was felt all across the rest of the primetime and daytime lineups for MSNBC as well as CNN.
The MSNBC primetime lineup averaged about 2.83 million viewers the week prior to Mueller’s report but fell to an average of 2.48 million viewers for the week after.
President Donald Trump tweeted about the decline in viewership for MSNBC and CNN — as much as 50 percent in some cases — though he chose to focus on his early morning nemesis “Morning Joe,” MSNBC co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
“Wow, ratings for ‘Morning Joe,’ which were really bad in the first place, just ‘tanked’ with the release of the Mueller Report. Likewise, other shows on MSNBC and CNN have gone down by as much as 50%. Just shows, Fake News never wins!” Trump tweeted Thursday.
Wow, ratings for “Morning Joe,” which were really bad in the first place, just “tanked” with the release of the Mueller Report. Likewise, other shows on MSNBC and CNN have gone down by as much as 50%. Just shows, Fake News never wins!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2019
At the same time, the report noted that Fox News’ already dominant ratings had seen a sharp uptick following the Mueller report, particularly for top-rated primetime host Sean Hannity, who received around an additional million more viewers on the Monday after the report as compared with the Monday before the report.
In fact, Hannity saw what could be his highest ratings ever on Wednesday when an estimated 4.3 million viewers tuned in, including 32 percent more viewers in the key demographic than the same night a week prior.
If it were murky before, it should be crystal clear now: MSNBC’s higher ratings over the past two years seem to have been driven almost exclusively by Maddow and the network’s obsession with the Russian collusion narrative.
With that narrative now debunked, and with little more than run-of-the-mill anti-Trump hatred to feed viewers, it appears that many of those viewers have had enough and have either changed the channel or simply turned the television off.
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