MSNBC’s boosters in the liberal media have a way of exaggerating their ratings victories. On Monday, The Huffington Post gushed in a headline “MSNBC Makes Network History With Stretch Of No. 1 Cable Ratings: The channel enjoyed a week as the winner.”
Rebecca Shapiro proclaimed “For the first time, MSNBC spent five consecutive weekdays as the most-watched cable network in prime time, bringing in more total viewers than its top news rivals, Fox News and CNN, and all other cable channels, according to Nielsen.” She suggested this came due to Megyn Kelly “defecting” to NBC News and Fox “parting ways with Bill O’Reilly amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment and bad behavior.”
She also touted how “bombshells continue to drop about members of President Donald Trump’s campaign interacting with Kremlin-linked individuals before and after the election.”
But the blog TV Newser offered a fuller look at the ratings picture: “MSNBC Wins Weeknights Across the Board; Fox News is Most-Watched For Full Calendar Week.” A.J. Katz summarized the full numbers:
Rachel Maddow had the No. 1 cable news show of the week, averaging 711,000 demo viewers and more than 2.9 million total viewers. But Fox News still managed to win the full calendar week (Monday July 17 – Sunday July 23), both in total day viewers (29th consecutive week) and in total prime time viewers (9th consecutive week), per Nielsen data.
TV Newser noted that for the full Monday to Sunday lineup, Fox won the primetime race with 1.93 million and MSNBC coming in second with 1.84 million. Fox won the Total Day ratings race with 1.223 million viewers to MSNBC coming in third on cable (behind Nickelodeon) with 955,000.
President Trump has been good for MSNBC's ratings -- if not their viewers' sanity -- but their liberal fans tend to over-celebrate, like their team was leading in the third quarter or the seventh inning.
MSNBC boosters skip over the fact that MSNBC isn’t as much of a news network on the weekends, although they have put on more live programming of late as opposed to the traditional diet of Lockup prison shows.
