Forgive me if I might come off as a tad unfeeling, but to the likes of those who cover media for a living that seem to be overly sympatico with those still crying in their lattes, enough’s enough.
In particular, I’m showing concern for THE WRAP’s Sharon Waxman, who dedicated her most recent WAXWORD essay this week to sharing how her own viewing habits have shifted in the past several days:
If you’re like me, you haven’t turned on the news since last Tuesday when Donald Trump won the election. Personally, I can’t bear to listen to another minute of wisdom from Joy Reid, my friend Lawrence O’Donnell or the admirable Rachel Maddow. I can’t hear Anderson Cooper, or Abby Phillip. Can’t abide getting the lowdown on NPR or from the New York Times’ Daily Michael Barbaro. Or “The View” ladies.
I’m not saying I’ll never watch or listen again. But – am I alone here? – my entire body recoils from listening to more claptrap from the same claptrapping apparatus.
And as if to back up her lamentations, her employee Kayla Cobb dropped this update of sorts yesterday morning:
MSNBC’s rating domination was short-lived: After beating CNN on its election night coverage for the first time in network history, the news network owned by NBCUniversal is now bleeding viewers in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
On election night, MSNBC scored 6 million viewers compared to CNN’s 5.1 million. But in the days after the election, the network’s total day ratings fell to 808,000 with a 90,000 in the coveted 25-to-54 year old demo, according to Nielsen.
These numbers reflect an average from last Wednesday to Friday. That marks a 54% decrease in the network’s viewership average in the month of October (1.765 million viewers) as well as a 51% decrease in the network’s year-to-date 2024 average (1.655 million viewers). Additionally, on Friday MSNBC saw 636,000 viewers and 61,000 in the demo, making it the network’s lowest rated non-holiday night of the year.CNN fared slightly better. In the days after the election, the news network’s total daily viewership fell to 611,000 with a 159,000 in the demo. That marked a 36% decrease compared to the network’s average viewership in the month of October (953,000 viewers) as well as a 26% decrease compared to its 2024 average (830,000 viewers).
And as if they were somehow in the same text chain that seems to be cropping up unsolicited in my social media feed, her competitor Elaine Low at THE ANKLER just happened to hit pause on her series of insider stories as to what the few significant buyers are considering buying to offer her own “special report”:
Welp, it’s Monday, Series Business readers. While I’d originally planned to bring you another installment of the Fall Market Guide, more pressing questions have arisen in the wake of last week’s election, which promises another four years of a Trump administration.
I’ll hope that those “pressing questions” are coming from her lunch and tennis dates, or perhaps her own detached mindset, rather than from her readership that heavily leans toward the executives her publication solicits as unnamed sources. Because if the latter proved to be true, it would indicate that they’re either too young or short-sighted to know how viewers dealt with the aftermath of a REAL tragedy and how actually asking them how THEY were feeling helped answer the kind of existential questions they are posing with their choice of coverage since the events of last week.
FX was committed to its reinvention with the greenlighting of what became THE SHIELD as soon as they had secured long-saught carriage on New York City’s Time Warner cable system, something that they had lacked for the first seven years of its existence. Blame that on the ego of Ted Turner, still corporately influential at the time, who was pissed as sh-t that Rupert Murdoch had dared to launch a competitor to his beloved CNN. Showing Ted fast asleep at a Braves-Yankees World Series game in the news section of THE NEW YORK POST at around the same time FOX NEWS was rolling out only fanned those flames.
The date of FX’s debut on Channel 58 in New York City was September 1, 2001. We had an aggressive marketing campaign, complete with billboards, transit signs and even umbrellas for hot dog and falafel stands tinged in the new colors and bolder logo that was being introduced. You know what happened ten days later. I still haven’t forgotten someone sending us the charred and tattered remnants of one of those umbrellas that was rescued from a location several blocks from Ground Zero the debris of the remains of the towers and the people that jumped from them still clinging to the canvas even after it had been shipped cross-country.
The ensuing months were chaotic, and when we all finally able to focus the degree of internal concern and second-guessing about moving forward with a program that was anything but escapist grew with every significant calendar day when the inevitable shot of the now-Twin Tower-less New York skyline would be shown. The Thanksgiving Day parade. The tree lighting. Even the holiday edition of Saturday Night Live. Even the most escapist holiday programming attempted to remind us to “never forget”.
And every time we’d have a meeting when my glass half-empty boss would raise these concerns, we’d all pontificate based on our own experiences, much like our intrepid journalists are doing. Much like the commentators and personalities on the networks and programs that are turning their stomachs are doing, and apparently appear hell bent on doing until at bare minimum the 2028 election cycle begins.
But once the distractions of holiday programming were finally over, and as our impending premiere date of March loomed larger, in a moment of inspiration I suggested that we actually use whatever potential clarity Nielsen could offer to serve as an arbiter. “We can isolate a sufficiently large section of their sample that was being measured both before and after 9/11. We can actually see what they watched before, during, and after the incident. We can actually look at what the size and audience composition of grittier and harsher dramas (read that HBO originals) looked like post-9/11 and we can then target our advertising toward folks that were quicker to “rebound”. And if you’re truly concerned, we can actually recruit test groups against those parameters and show them both our pilot and our potential campaigns and contrast their findings against those of what we’ve already seen.”
Grudgingly, my management agreed. We conducted all of this qualitative and qualitative research around the time of the 2002 Winter Olympics, which just happened to be taking place in the United States. Those Olympics proved to be exactly the cleansing and catharsis needed to provide those who needed it with more distance from the truly disruptive tragedy. Thanks in part to being in our own time zones, viewership was well above levels seen from those set in Korea and Norway in 1998 and 1994, respectively. We conducted some of that research in New York City itself, as we felt we needed to get the voices of those personally impacted heard.
You might be surprised to learn that not only was the composition of those “gritty dramas” younger and more affluent that pre-9/11, but when we showed them THE SHIELD’s pilot their dial scores and descriptors were even more overwhelmingly positive than those we had obtained from our pre-9/11 testing. And the best ones of all? You guessed it, New York, New York.
We moved forward. We even rolled out a second outdoor campaign in New York City, albeit without the food cart umbrellas (people tend not to stand around and nosh outside in winter months). And, of course, you know how the rest of that all worked out. I’d like to think at least some of the unnamed sources that Elaine Low has been noshing or volleying with lately might at least have some knowledge of that, too. After all, the likelihood is none of them would even have jobs now if our trailblazing effort hadn’t gone well.
I’d also like to think that somewhere within the halls of 30 Rock or the Universal City lot someone at Comcast might have access to, and perhaps a few extra dollars, to conduct some sort of research similar to what we did. Maybe they’re not watching MSNBC now, and perhaps they may indeed come back. Cobb’s article hinted at that, although perhaps her boss was too busy doom-scrolling to notice:
This is also part of a fairly expected viewership decline. Directly after the 2016 election, ratings for MSNBC fell. The network then went on to have its four most watched years in its history from 2017 to 2020.
Of course, at that time there was enough curiosity and dissention among incumbents and even staffers to provide both content and a belief that the Trump era would be short-lived. This time, of course, the verdict has been much more conclusive and unilateral. Republicans not only control all three branches of government, but their leader is building a team of lackeys that have enough personal investment and transactional connection to goosestep their way into doing literally anything he may decide to do, no matter how much bitching and moaning Joyless Reid or Whoopiless Goldberg may attempt to impart to their remaining audience. And if you truly do believe in democracy, this was, like it or not, a shining example of it. At least for now, there’s more who don’t think like you than there are that do.
So maybe you’re not in the mood to continue to watch an increasingly despondent minority point fingers and lament what was. My question is–what ARE you now watching and, just as importantly, what might you be open to watching next?
I know the data exists to answer those questions, and I know it’s possible to conduct responsible, objective research to get at those answers. If you’re a top executive at Comcast, you have more than enough skin in this game to want to know, because you’d ideally like to have as many of those MSNBC eschewers stay within your family of networks and platforms as possible so you can continue to monetize them. If you’re a competitor, you’d probably like to know what you have that they may already have migrated to, or what you have under consideration that might.
I’m surprised the likes of Low and especially Waxman haven’t asked that question themselves. There might even be ways to start a Patreon effort to help conduct those studies themselves. Might be more interesting content than what they’ve been offering of late.
And if you don’t quite know how to do it with cost and results effectiveness, my hand is raised high to offer my expertise to you. At a discount, of course. Consider it my way of proactively contributing to your necessary intervention.
Until next time…