Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made a controversial decision to meet with President-elect Donald Trump following his election victory. It appears to be killing them in the ratings.
Now, to be fair, MSNBC’s ratings were on a downward trend regardless. While they still managed to outdraw CNN on election night, their numbers represent a 29% drop.
But Joe and Mika did themselves no favors by bending the knee to Trump. Conservatives laughed at the hypocrites they’d known the pair to be for some time. But leftists were equally outraged that they held tea with “literal Hitler.”
That one-two combination is showing up in the network’s ratings. Not good for a company undergoing a serious overhaul that could lead to massive layoffs and a complete re-branding.
Morning Joe average audience is down 20% from Monday to Wednesday, to 618,000 viewers:
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) November 21, 2024
+ and down 45% in the 25-to-54 demo, to 49,000 viewers.
MSNBC’s Ratings Are Going From Bad To Worse
Raw data provided by Nielsen Media Research shows the continued ratings exodus from Morning Joe on Wednesday, November 20th—two days after Mika and Joe announced their Mar-a-Lago meeting with President-elect Trump.
According to the data, MSNBC’s flagship morning show delivered its lowest-rated program since 2021 in the coveted 25-54 year age demographic, cratering 41% with that group.
Morning Joe, according to the data, averaged 647,000 viewers and 51,000 in that demo, down 60% versus their third quarter average with them in 2024.
“Every day since its hosts discussed their meeting with Trump, each show is lower rated than the previous day’s as viewers have continued to flee Morning Joe,” an email from Fox News states.
Just look at these numbers.
RELATED: Comcast Restructuring May Force MSNBC To Change Name, Reduce Outlet To A ‘Well-Funded Startup’
The Trouble Has Just Begun
After Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, Comcast, the parent company of MSNBC, is undergoing a significant restructuring.
This involves spinning off its cable networks, including MSNBC, into a separate company called SpinCo. The restructuring has led to considerable uncertainty at the network, with potential changes including renaming it and reducing it to what top brass are calling a “well-funded startup.”
Layoffs and pay cuts seem inevitable. Joe and Mika even awkwardly addressed that possibility.
“I mean, I could be completely wrong: we could all be fired a year from now,” Scarborough said on his show, “When this happens, you never know what’s going to happen.”
His comment prompted wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski to add, “Or tomorrow.”
Reports have now surfaced that fellow MSNBC star Rachel Maddow had her salary slashed by $5 million.
