Jen Psaki, MSNBC Officially Hit Rock-Bottom As Network’s Future Hangs In The Balance

From hell to high water, everything bad is coming for MSNBC, which last week recorded its lowest-ever audience shares for three of its weeknight staple programs.

Liberal audiences are fleeing in droves as the “tune out” phenomenon takes hold. Anchors like “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough are being pilloried by their colleagues for clandestinely meeting with President-elect Donald Trump. Staff, meanwhile, are furious at on-air talents like Rachel Maddow, who continues to command the network’s largest annual salary in spite of driving MSNBC’s ratings into the ground. The bout of terrible, no good, very bad news is taking its toll, as evidenced in the latest Nielsen ratings.

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The Gateway Pundit reports that “Alex Wagner Tonight,” “Inside with Jen Psaki,” and “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” all recorded their lowest audience scores in the span of a week, an ominous sign for a station that’s slashing jobs and salaries post-election. The downward spirals are more surprising considering the busy news week with plenty to cover, including the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and an ensuing four-day manhunt. The fallout from President Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter and the overthrowing of Syria’s Assad ruling family also captured viewers of every other network except MSNBC, which has managed to so severely alienate its audience that it’s conceivable those viewers may never return.

“Alex Wagner Tonight,” which airs on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET, averaged just 595,000 viewers during the week of December 2nd, its worst performance since debuting in 2022. “Inside with Jen Psaki” has scored just 651,000 viewers since it launched last year, indicating that the former Biden spokeswoman’s sheen is starting to wear off. “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” despite collecting more viewers than the prior week, hit an all-time low in the key 25-54 age demographic and saw just 61,000 tune in — the lowest on record since its 2010 launch.

If they are in a race to the bottom, Rachel Maddow is still in the lead: the face of MSNBC has lost 43% of her total audience since President-elect Trump’s victory, but that didn’t stop the network from re-signing her to a five-year contract. Not far behind are Brzezinski and Scarborough, who saw their flagship “Morning Joe” program lose 35% of all viewers — about 720,000 on average — while being down 37% in the key advertising demographic of 25-54-year-olds, as scored by Nielsen. Last week, the two lambasted their critics for declaring them hypocritical after calling Trump a “fascist” for most of the year, only to then turn around and hold an off-the-record conversation with him at Mar-a-Lago.

The sagging ratings come at a critical juncture for Comcast, which recently announced it will be spinning off NBCUniversal assets, including MSNBC, into a standalone company that can’t rely on NBC to cover its bottom line. With fewer shared resources, speculation abounds about whether the network’s executives will allow its one-sided, out-of-touch coverage to continue without pushback from more pro-Trump guests.

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