At MSNBC, Rising Tensions Fuel Fears of Collapse

MSNBC is Garbage and People know it who engages  their brain 

MSNBC’s postelection viewership decline has surpassed its executives’ worst fears. Several top shows have lost more than half of their viewers since Nov. 5. This includes Rachel Maddow’s flagship show, as well as Joy Reid’s ReidOut, The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, All In with Chris Hayes, and Inside with Jen Psaki. Morning Joe has suffered a fate nearly as bad, with hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough losing over 400,000 viewers in the same period.

In total, MSNBC averaged more than one million viewers during election week, but that number fell to just above half a million two weeks ago. This decline comes even as Fox News is scoring huge ratings, as viewership jumped 21 percent at the network following Trump’s win. (RELATED: MSNBC’s Attacks on Pete Hegseth Are Not About Trump — It’s About Fox News)

The collapse in viewership alone would be enough to induce panic among MSNBC staffers, but tensions have escalated even more following Comcast’s Nov. 20 announcement that it will spin off MSNBC and other channels, including CNBC, USA, Oxygen, and E!, into a separate company. Staffers are fretting that this will decimate the network’s journalistic reputability given that MSNBC’s relationship with NBC News provides it with a significant proportion of its journalistic resources. For instance, MSNBC utilizes NBC’s news bureaus and foreign correspondents to supplement its more opinion-focused staff. Without these resources, MSNBC would be pared back to hosts reading from a teleprompter in New York City or moderating roundtable discussions.

Staffers fear that the spinoff will result in layoffs, lower pay, and potentially even a sale. Under the current arrangement, NBCUniversal cable channels generate only 5.7 percent of Comcast’s current revenue, and the declining value of cable TV makes these channels even less appealing. By reorganizing the networks into a standalone company, Comcast may be positioning itself to offload this undesirable segment of its business. It also appears that MSNBC has overly high expenses. Most notably, Rachel Maddow just signed a contract to receive $25 million a year even though she only hosts her show once a week.

Last week, the Washington Post interviewed a number of MSNBC staffers who voiced fears over the network’s future. “We’re going to become a guest-driven, fully opinion operation that doesn’t even have the appearance of being a news-driven operation,” worried one MSNBC staffer to the Post. What went unsaid in that staffer’s comment is that MSNBC has been steadily cementing its status as a progressive opinion outlet for years, with news programming slowly being replaced by opinion-driven shows. Earlier this year, it seemed that this shift had been successful, as MSNBC had consistently outperformed CNN to stand only behind Fox News in cable news ratings.

But even as MSNBC’s focus on progressive opinion boosted its performance, concerns lingered at Comcast that this would taint the company’s news-oriented channels, particularly NBC affiliates. (READ MORE: Dems Click Off MSNBC and Discover There’s No Place Like Home)

There was even a time when Comcast executives intervened when the ideology went too far. According to the New York Times, Comcast “took the rare step of conveying its concern” after MSNBC trotted out guests in the midst of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack to say that the attacks were the result of Israeli policies. Some on the network also refused to refer to the Hamas invaders as “terrorists.” The network subsequently removed three hosts, Ayman Mohyeldin, Mehdi Hasan, and Ali Velshi, from its lineup, but denied that their opinions were the reason for the removal.

In recent days, MSNBC has been beset by two controversies that show the divisions tearing the already crumbling network apart.

First, it emerged that Al Sharpton, who hosts his own show on MSNBC and appears on a number of its programs, had failed to disclose that his nonprofit, the National Action Network, had received $500,000 from Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign before he interviewed her during the presidential campaign on MSNBC. The outlet has continued to feature Sharpton on its shows and has said that it was unaware of the donation. But this decision has riled up staffers who feel the lack of reaction to Sharpton’s breach of journalistic ethics damages the network’s credibility. According to Fox News, MSNBC colleagues are “buzzing about the ordeal.” One MSNBC staffer told Fox News, “There’s a sense of like, ‘Ugh, we don’t need this. This feels kind of grifty and gross.’” The staffer continued, “That kind of money should not be changing hands to people who are cosplaying being a journalist.”

Second, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski received backlash from viewers after they traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with Donald Trump in order to “restart communications.” Scarborough sought to assure viewers that their engagement with the president-elect did not mean they were condoning any of his actions. “Don’t be mistaken,” he said. “We are not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We are here to report on him and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times.” But viewers protested the show after the visit, seeing it as a capitulation made out of fear after years of the pair portraying Trump as a fascist.

Inside the network, the hosts’ discussion with the Republican president-elect reportedly set off a firestorm of angst. According to the U.S. Sun, one MSNBC journalist said that the “Trump visit had created a very tense situation,” with some at the network feeling that they had been “stabbed in the back.” The source went on to say that hosts Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Eri Melber were in particular inflamed about the situation. Meanwhile, MSNBC host Katie Phang publicly stated, “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea.”

Even as MSNBC continues to struggle with plummeting viewership, internal discord, and questions about its journalistic integrity — or lack thereof — some executives remain hopeful that a second “Trump bump” will return when the former president retakes office come January. Yet there remains a scenario in which the network continues to fall further into irrelevance as its progressive elitism becomes increasingly detached from the common American experience and cable news is increasingly supplanted by independent media. In that case, Comcast could sell MSNBC off to a progressive billionaire who could cement the network’s role as a mouthpiece for the Left, abandoning any remaining efforts at journalism and neutrality, but possibly further decreasing its relevance. Or Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, could buy the network, as he has suggested, and transform it as he did Twitter. Whatever the case, MSNBC will remain in turmoil.

https://spectator.org/at-msnbc-rising-tensions-fuel-fears-of-collapse/

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