Viewers continue to bolt from Morning Joe amid fallout over hosts ‘kissing the ring’ at Mar-a-Lago=
Tue, December 3, 2024 at 11:18 AM
MSNBC viewers continue to give Morning Joe the cold shoulder following the revelation that hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski trekked to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump.
The precipitous ratings drop comes at the worst possible time for the morning talk show. On Wednesday, parent company Comcast announced that it was spinning off most of NBCUniversal’s cable channel lineup amid rampant cord-cutting — including cable news networks MSNBC and CNBC.
A representative for MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to Nielsen,=the four-hour broadcast of Morning Joe drew only 680,000 total viewers on Tuesday, representing a 12 percent dip from Monday’s airing. Additionally,the program only averaged 86,000 viewers in the coveted advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54, also down 12 percent from the previous day.
Compared to the average viewership for2024, Morning Joe’s total audience on Tuesday was down 38 percent and 37 percent in the key demo. Tuesday also represented thethird-lowest-rated Morning Joe broadcast of the year. This further continues the slide that began the moment Scarborough and Brzezinski revealed on Monday that they had recently sat down with Trump to “restart communications.”
The moment the husband-and-wife pair opened Monday’s show by dramatically announcing they’d sought to mend fences with the incoming president,after spending years describing him as a threat to democracy and a “fascist,” droves of MSNBC’s devoted anti-Trump viewers flipped the channel.
While it’s typical for the show to grow its audience throughout the morning,Morning Joe lost viewers immediately after the announcement. During the 6 a.m. block, the program averaged 839,000 total viewers and 113,000 in the 25-54 demographic. The next hour, though, overall viewership dropped to 694,000 and sunk 38 percent in the demo.
That hour-to-hour dropoff, according to Nielsen, was based on the “live plus same day” ratings — which track both live viewership and those who watch the program later via DVR. The Nov. 18 telecast had an unusually high number of “time-shifted” viewers who watched via recording the hour that the Morning Joe hosts announced the Mar-a-Lago visit. While 426,000 viewers tuned in live to watch the 6 a.m. hour, another 413,000 checked it out later in the day on DVR. The DVR audience for the first hour was 77 percent higher than the week before. Subsequent hours for that broadcast saw much smaller “time-shifted” viewership numbers.
Amid the intense blowback from viewers and critics alike, with someblasting the hosts’ “disgusting show of obeisance in advance” while accusing them of being “double agents,” the MSNBC stars have dismissed the criticism. “I saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world—all very positive, very supportive,” Scarborough told viewers on Tuesday….
Lesson Joe and Mika, when you teach people to hate with deep anger, they will do it to you, when you betray them
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lifestyle/viewers-continue-bolt-morning-joe-140109779.html