Averaging 539,000 viewers in primetime and 175,000 viewers in the adults 25-54 demographic, MSNBC suffered double-digit drops from last May -- down a respective 20 and 19 percent. Losses were less substantial in total day, down 10 percent to an average 346,000 viewers and down 7 percent to 115,000 adults 25-54, while all other nets pulled growth in multiple categories.
The soft start for All In With Chris Hayes has not helped. Hayes, down 32 percent in total viewers from The Ed Show last May, has offered a poor lead-in for MSNBC's primetime flagship, The Rachel Maddow Show, at 9 p.m. The show delivered its lowest-rated month since it debuted in September 2008 (717,000 total viewers) and its second lowest with adults 25-54 (210,000). Maddow was topped by typical time slot victor Sean Hannity and CNN's Piers Morgan.
Recently it was reported that ratings for CNN's Piers Morgan Show has taken CNN's 9 pm time slot to the lowest levels in two decades, which is indicative of the fall of the most popular media personalities of the political left between Maddow and Morgan.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton and Martin Bashir, landed in fourth place in their timeslots—a marked change from their normal second-place status.
By the way, Fox's Sean Hannity saw his ratings soar by 18 percent, which is pointed out by The American Spectator, who also notes that others reporting this, somehow forgot to mention that little tidbit.
There are a couple very entertaining spins on this news coming from liberals, well worth mentioning.
For example, Atrios claims, MSNBC isn't really all that liberal...... excuse me while I fall off my chair laughing.
Then we have Joe Gandelman over at The Moderate Voice, claiming that MSNBC's downfall is the new show All in With Chris Hayes and, of course, since that show is right before Rachel Maddow's show, her tanking ranking could be Hayes' fault also.
Although, Gandelman is honest enough to admit to one of Maddow's many failings:
Yes, she is highly intelligent and she does do her show by a different drummer, but it can be grating to hear her repeat the same idea or fact reworded five times or slowly slide into a story. She repeats reworded the same idea or fact five times of slowly sides into a story. On a story, she may slowly slide and repeat the same idea or fact not once or twice or three or four times but five times. Five times (you get the idea..The idea you get…Idea, you get it..).
The bottom line is, die-hard liberals will tune into MSNBC and especially the liberal favorite, Rachel Maddow, but everyone else....meh, not so much.
Face it, if people other than the die-hard liberals, wanted to watch Maddow, but didn't enjoy the show before hers, they could easily click their remotes and tune her in when All in With Chris Hayes was over.
They aren't.
This also helps explain why liberals felt the need to create all those fake Rachel Maddow supporters on Twitter back in March.
They must have seen the writing on the wall.