The Rise and Decline and Decline and Decline and Poop-Eating of MSNBC

Eh, MSNBC chiefly exists to provide easy content to right-wing bloggers and Tommy Christopher.

Politico's Dylan Byers charts MSNBC's fall.

There are only so many ways to say MSNBC sucks. Let's try it in graph form.

Pictured (L to R): A black line, a red line, and a yellow line;
and another black line, another red line, and another yellow line

MSNBC suffered harder loses in 2013 -- in terms of both viewership and revenue -- than either of its competitors at Fox News and CNN, according to Nielsen data featured in a new Pew Research report. Primetime viewership declined by a staggering 24 percent (nearly twice the loss sustained by CNN and four-times that sustained by Fox News). Daytime viewership fell by 15 percent, even as it rose at both of the other networks.

On the revenue side, MSNBC was projected to decline by 2 percent, while both CNN and Fox News were projected to experience growth of 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively. MSNBC was expected to bring in $475 million in revenue: less than half what CNN will make and roughly one-quarter of what Fox News will make.

Politico's article is mostly taken from a Pew report on the State of the Media.

In bad news, network newscasts actually gained viewers, but at least NBC lost them:

In the evening, an average of 22.6 million viewers tuned into one of the three commercial broadcast news programs on ABC, CBS or NBC, a 2.3% increase over the average viewership for 2012, according to Pew Research analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. The ABC World News increased 2.2% to 7.7 million viewers on average and CBS Evening News increased 6.5% to 6.5 million viewers. NBC Nightly News, the ratings leader, was the only evening news program to decrease, dipping 0.7% to 8.4 million viewers on average.

Byers' blames MSNBC's woes on the relative decline of the only story the network cares about: Bush Bad, Obama Good (or perhaps, Obama God).

With Bush now out of office for over five years, and Obama's presidency looking like, at best, a "slog" (the media's term), and at worst, an unmitigated disaster (everyone else's term), they're trying to get by on Outrage Porn alone.

And Ronan Farrow. Who was a Rhodes Scholar, you know.

posted by Ace at 12:56 PM

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