Donald Trump’s first term as president was the best thing that ever happened to MSNBC. The Democratic-aligned cable news channel enjoyed record ratings between 2017 and 2020 as anxious #Resistance liberals tuned in for group therapy sessions hosted by Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and other anti-Trump commentators whose increasingly unhinged rhetoric mirrored the deteriorating mental health of their viewers. But after four years of sagging ratings under President Joe Biden, amid a media landscape that has changed dramatically since 2016, there is reason to doubt that MSNBC and its roster of relentlessly partisan grievance-mongers can repeat that success in Trump’s second term. A more pressing question: Can the network even survive in its current form?
In the days since the election, MSNBC’s ratings haven’t seen a “Trump bump”—they’ve cratered. More on that shortly. But the ratings collapse comes as MSNBC—with its increasingly ugly rhetoric, denigration of Trump supporters, and ethically challenged hosts—has emerged as a major headache for parent company Comcast, much as Fox News Channel was a perennial problem for its then-parent company, 21st Century Fox, or CNN was for its then-owner, Time Warner, in Trump’s first term. Furthermore, MSNBC’s harsh partisanship is increasingly seen as a drag on its sister news operation, the supposedly nonpartisan NBC News, which is dogged by allegations of liberal bias and continues to draw fewer viewers than rival ABC News.
Comcast’s recent comments that it’s considering spinning off its portfolio of cable channels suggest that the company’s owners, the billionaire Roberts family, would like to rid themselves of MSNBC, and the accompanying bad publicity, once and for all. It is, after all, “a declining asset.” After averaging 1.1 million viewers in the month of October, MSNBC’s rating declined more than 30 percent last week in the days following Trump’s election. During the primetime hours of 8-11 p.m.—when advertising rates are the highest—the network’s ratings plummeted more than 50 percent. NBCUniversal put out a press release boasting that, for the first time in history, MSNBC had more viewers on Election Night than CNN, even though many attributed those numbers to gleeful conservatives tuning in to gawk at the left-wing pundits experiencing public meltdowns. Not to mention the fact that CNN was also experiencing a historic ratings collapse in the Biden era.
Days before the election, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh announced the company was exploring the option of spinning off its struggling cable networks—which include MSNBC and CNBC as well as Bravo, E!, and Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen—into a separate entity. Comcast’s stock price jumped, an apparent confirmation that many investors indeed view these cable networks as declining assets. MSNBC in particular, with its reputation for partisan hysteria, looks increasingly like a tainted liability that company executives would be wise to jettison. Puck‘s Dylan Byers, often regarded as a pliant mouthpiece for corporate titans who revels in layoffs and pours salt in the wounds of declining news organizations, described Cavanagh’s announcement as “the latest reminder that several of the media institutions that played starring roles in Trump’s first term might not be up for it this time around.”
In an article headlined “The #Resistance Is Futile,” Byers ran through the various reasons why MSNBC might not have “the muscle or momentum to return to its old, occasionally shrill form.” The former Politico scribe, best known for helping ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos preempt a Washington Free Beacon report on his donations to the Clinton Foundation, explained that MSNBC’s most popular host, Rachel Maddow, works just one night a week despite signing a massive new contract worth $30 million per year. Byers observed that Maddow’s colleagues at the network “increasingly seem to be influencing no one other than themselves and about a million or so liberals with AARP cards.” The Free Beacon can confirm that elderly whites—who shelled out thousands of dollars for tickets—were disproportionately represented at the MSNBC “democracy” festival in Brooklyn two months ago. (NBC nepo baby Luke Russert hosted the event.)
MSNBC is hardly the only liberal media outlet struggling to confront this grim reality. CNN is reportedly planning to fire “hundreds” of employees and scale back on ludicrously exorbitant anchor salaries (who is “John Berman” and why does he make more than $1 million a year?) in an effort to cut costs and divert more resources to its digital operations to restore its once-respectable brand. The beleaguered Washington Post conducted a round of layoffs in 2023, a year in which the publication posted a loss of nearly $80 million. The Post‘s traffic has dropped 60 percent since its peak in April 2020, when lefty readers flocked to the website in droves for anti-Trump COVID updates.
But there is reason to believe that MSNBC is uniquely ill-suited to bounce back in the post-Biden era. The network’s top personalities exude all of the traits many Democrats argue have caused the party to lose touch with normal Americans. Sneering condescension. Inscrutable woke vocabulary. A tendency to embrace bizarre conspiracy theories and view every political problem through the lens of patriarchal white supremacy. The MSNBC stable of “talent” is rife with individuals tainted by scandal of some kind. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Rachel Maddow
MSNBC’s premier host is now making about $30 million a year to work one day a week, a deal that’s become an increasing source of embarrassment for former boy wonder Cesar Conde, the NBCUniversal News Group chairman who was somehow suckered into approving the arrangement. Over the last eight years, during and prior to her semi-retirement, Maddow has sought to justify her astronomical paycheck by pushing a spurious welter of conspiracy theories involving Trump’s alleged ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. During the Trump administration, she covered every Russia-related storyline with what National Review‘s Rich Lowry described as “a consistent breathlessness.” Guardian columnist Ross Barkan slammed Maddow as the epitome of the liberal media’s overzealous pursuit of ratings in the #Resistance era. “No twist was too minuscule or outlandish for Maddow,” he wrote. “Every night, seemingly, brought another nail in the coffin of the soon-to-be-dead Trump presidency.” Barkan wondered, in March 2019, if Maddow would face a “reckoning” for her hysterical coverage. Not exactly.
Despite (or perhaps because of) Maddow’s years of credulous on-camera detective work being thoroughly discredited, Conde decided to pay her more to work less. Earlier this year, Maddow produced her first documentary, shamelessly titled From Russia with Lev, about Lev Parnas, the obscure Ukrainian figure who served 20 months in prison for making illegal donations to Trump’s campaign. We’re still waiting for NBC News “disinformation reporter” Brandy Zadrozny to turn her attention to Maddow’s Russia reports.
Al Sharpton
Sharpton, the formerly obese racial agitator who promoted the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and incited an anti-Semitic riot in Crown Heights, has found a lucrative home at MSNBC, collecting what’s believed to be a high-six-figure to low-seven-figure salary to struggle to read the teleprompter on his weekend show, PoliticsNation. He frequently appears elsewhere on the network as an expert on racial grievance and combating anti-Semitism. (Seriously.) Sharpton described the widespread criticism of Claudine Gay, the Harvard president who resigned in disgrace after she failed to condemn anti-Semitism on campus and was exposed as a serial plagiarist, as “an attack on every black woman in this country.” A shameless grifter, Sharpton is believed to have gotten his first MSNBC show in 2011 in a quid pro quo for using his political connections to help finalize Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal. (NBC denies this, but no one believes them.) In 2015, black business tycoon Byron Allen sued Comcast, Sharpton, and other civil rights groups, accusing Comcast of making “sham diversity agreements” with Sharpton in exchange for $3.8 million in donations to his far-left activist group, the National Action Network.
Sharpton recently orchestrated a $500,000 donation from Kamala Harris’s campaign to his nonprofit a few weeks before conducting a softball interview with the candidate on his show. The Free Beacon reported on Thursday that the National Action Network has twice awarded (in 2020 and 2024) MSNBC president Rashida Jones its “Chairman’s Award,” an accolade she lists on her official bio, bestowed upon her by Sharpton, someone her network has paid millions of dollars. Perhaps Maddow should train her documentary cameras on this shameless grifting rather than helping Parnas rebrand himself as a victim of Trump’s “treason.”
Joy Reid
Considered by many cable television observers to be MSNBC’s new standard-bearer, in light of Maddow’s near-total absence, Joy Reid is believed to make about $3 million year. She uses her MSNBC platform to spew—unchallenged—racially charged bile at the same time as she puts one foot in her mouth after the other. Last week, Megyn Kelly called Reid “racist” and demanded that NBC fire her after Reid suggested that Trump would deport “brown people” who were in the country legally. “She wants a race riot,” said Kelly, who herself was pushed out of NBC after she defended a Bravo star, “Countess” Luann de Lesseps, for wearing blackface on Halloween. Reid has faced no such consequences for her almost daily racist remarks.
Seemingly indifferent to any standards of decency, Reid, a Harvard graduate, presides over a show that is a carnival of racial grievance, nastiness, and assorted nonsense. Experts are invited on to complain that Republicans have “doubled down on the idea of codifying white nationalism” by making it “literally illegal” for black people to vote. She accused Republicans of having “taught people the word ‘inflation.'” Her inability to relate to normal Americans is remarkable even for an MSNBC host. For instance, Reid was shocked that Harris lost after waging a “flawlessly run” campaign and being endorsed by Queen Latifah, who “never endorses anyone.” She has since lashed out at Latino men for betraying their race. “Y’all voted with Stephen Miller and David Duke, and against your own sisters,” she said. “So, you own everything that happens to your mixed-status families and to your wives, sisters, and abuelas from here on in.” Reid also interviewed a Yale psychologist who said Harris voters were “entitled” to shun their Trump-voting family members because it “may be essential for your mental health.”
Reid’s power within MSNBC has grown considerably since facing what some thought would be a career-ending crisis in 2018. When internet sleuths uncovered homophobic and anti-Semitic posts on her old blog, she falsely claimed to have been hacked and asked authorities to investigate the alleged crime. (Nothing came of it, obviously.) As more and more offensive blog postings turned up, making it manifestly clear that Reid was lying, her job was saved by Maddow, who as a gay woman vouched for Reid’s character. Now Reid is unfettered and untrammeled, firmly entrenched in the upper echelons of the NBC News Group’s power elite, free to race-bait and demean normal Americans as she sees fit.
Nicolle Wallace
In October 2022, disgraced former FBI official Peter Strzok went on Wallace’s show and said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were “nothing compared to January 6,” referring to the 2021 unrest at the Capitol. That’s pretty much all you need to know about Wallace’s show on MSNBC, one of the lowest-rated programs on television. As far as Wallace is concerned, the events of Nov. 5, 2024, might be even worse. “The stakes literally are life and death for every woman in America,” she said of the election. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s not an exaggeration.” (It was.) At one point Wallace, a former Republican operative with ties to Sarah Palin, warned she could be taken off the air if Trump won. (She definitely could, just not for the reason she had in mind.). Wallace, who was played by a dour Sarah Paulson in the movie Game Change, became a diehard member of the liberal elite after moving to New York City and getting paid lots of money to appear on television. The now-52-year-old divorced her first husband in 2019 and announced she was dating New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, 41, who regularly appeared on her show. Schmidt, now married to Wallace, is coproducing a new Netflix series with Noah Oppenheim, the self-dealing former NBC News president whose wife “wrote” a children’s book with Savannah Guthrie that got coveted promotion on the Today show. He also allegedly discouraged Ronan Farrow from reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse. Crotchety liberal activist Robert De Niro will play the lead.
Stephanie Ruhle
Kamala Harris chose the aging and formerly attractive host to conduct her first solo interview of the campaign in late September. It was an obvious choice, given that days earlier Ruhle had eagerly defended Harris by arguing that the vice president’s policy views didn’t really matter because Trump was a threat to democracy. At the aforementioned MSNBC “democracy” summit, Ruhle scolded the American people for being concerned about inflation and suggested Harris’s critics were racist. “When people say, ‘Oh, she’s super-progressive,’ what they’re really saying is ‘She’s a black woman,'” Ruhle huffed indignantly. She is a notorious flirt. When she worked at Bloomberg, Ruhle was known for wearing yoga pants and working out in the newsroom, climbing up on the studio desks like a crazy person. She was embroiled in a shareholder lawsuit against Under Armour after the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that she had an intimate relationship with Under Armour’s CEO, Kevin Plank. Ruhle, who’s married with kids, was alleged to have traveled with Plank on his private jet and provided business advice to the executive. She even hawked Under Armour shoes on the Today show—without disclosing the relationship. MSNBC still credulously promoted her in 2020. Ruhle seamlessly shifted from shameless suck-up to Bloomberg CEOs to clownishly liberal TV activist. Joy Reid had better watch out: Ruhle’s ambition knows no bounds.
Joe Scarborough
Like most MSNBC viewers, his entire personality and political outlook consists of hating Donald Trump. For Scarborough, though, it’s personal. His long-running friendly relationship with Trump soured into an intense personal hatred, perhaps due to Scarborough’s own presidential ambitions. The dispute reached its nadir when in 2017, when Trump claimed that Joe’s on-air sidekick (and future wife), Mika Brzezinski, was “bleeding badly from a facelift.” Trump, while president, called Joe “psycho” and Mika “low IQ.” He also urged NBC, via X, to investigate a “mystery” in Joe’s past (a female staffer was found dead in his Florida congressional office in 2001, a tragedy that has dogged Joe for years; an AP “fact check” claimed the woman died from natural causes).
Fast-forward to 2024. Joe is rumored to have extracted from NBCUniversal a compensation package for himself and Mika that is fairly close to Maddow’s in size, albeit for more work. He’d been privately advising Kamala Harris for years and vigorously defended Joe Biden against critics who questioned the president’s cognitive health. “I’m about to tell you the truth,” the Morning Joe host said in March, several weeks before Biden’s infamous debate disaster. “And eff you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years.”
Network executives were so terrified of what Scarborough—known inside 30 Rock as the most unpleasant person to work there since Keith Olbermann—might say after Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania, they temporarily suspended his show. Joe erupted in rage, claiming on-air that MSNBC executives lied to him. When Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, came under fire for sleeping with his nanny, slapping his ex-girlfriend, and running a pervy law firm, Scarborough arranged a friendly interview in which he dismissed the allegations as right-wing “tabloid stories” and asked Emhoff how he stayed “centered” and “disciplined” through it all. In the days since the election, Scarborough has expressed disbelief at the high cost of butter and disparaged Latino men who voted for Trump as racist misogynists.
Jen Psaki
She joined MSNBC as a host in 2022 after leaving her job as White House press secretary in the Biden administration, which makes sense because there’s basically no difference between the two jobs. After becoming a “journalist,” Psaki continued to insist that Biden was perfectly healthy and fit to serve another term in office, contrary to the available evidence. She “interviewed” MSNBC analysts such as Robert Gibbs, the former Obama press secretary, and Ben Rhodes, the former Obama adviser who bragged about manipulating “clueless” reporters. In August, Psaki was questioned by members of Congress about her role in the administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and admitted she made no attempt to “challenge or question” the information she relayed to the press, much of which turned out to be inaccurate.
Jacob Soboroff
Most people have never heard of the MSNBC/NBC News immigration “reporter” (whose real estate mogul father is the former commissioner of the LAPD) and former Michael Bloomberg aide. Some might remember seeing a video of Soboroff having the time of his life amid a crowd of chanting liberals at the Democratic convention this summer. The so-called journalist—who technically works for supposedly objective NBC News—grinned ecstatically while holding up cardboard cutouts of Tim Walz’s face and attempting to converse with Rachel Maddow, who revealed that her MSNBC colleagues “got out of their seats and started stamping and clapping” during Walz’s utterly forgettable speech in Chicago.
Soboroff’s 2020 book attacking the Trump administration’s immigration policies was adapted into an Errol Morris documentary, Separated, released earlier this year. Despite being fêted at lefty film festivals, NBCUniversal has mysteriously delayed airing the documentary until December, without explanation. Perhaps it’s because Soboroff and MSNBC are being sued for $30 million by a Georgia doctor whom Soboroff and others smeared on multiple MSNBC shows in 2020 as “the uterus collector,” claiming the doctor went on a hysterectomy spree at an immigration detention center, removing women’s uteruses willy-nilly.
Soboroff and three MSNBC stars—Maddow, Wallace, and Chris Hayes—were cited in the doctor’s lawsuit for making what a judge determined to be “verifiably false” statements. Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist who has treated immigrant detainees, sued NBCUniversal after multiple MSNBC personalities falsely accused him of performing medically unnecessary “mass hysterectomies.” Soboroff and his NBC News colleagues based their reporting on claims made by a “whistleblower” nurse, which she admitted were based on hearsay and were ultimately proven false. Emails, text messages, and conference call transcripts uncovered in the discovery process revealed that MSNBC journalists and executives expressed doubts about the veracity of the so-called whistleblower’s claims but reported them anyway.
Chris Hayes
When he first showed up on MSNBC as a guest host for Maddow, viewers were struck by his strong physical resemblance to the host he was replacing. NBC staff whispered that he was “the male Rachel, but he can’t anchor.” Despite these shortcomings, Hayes quickly emerged as Maddow’s pet project, first getting a show on the weekends and eventually moving to an 8 p.m. show as Maddow’s lead-in.
In his earnest attempts to mimic Maddow’s snobby, highbrow, intellectual pretentiousness, Hayes the Favorite frequently beclowns himself. The radio host Mark Levin called MSNBC a “freak show” for broadcasting a bizarre and potty-mouthed rant by Hayes in which the awkward star stood before the camera and furiously denounced Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) for signing several bills banning sex-change treatments and surgeries for minors. Hayes screamed that it’s “none of [DeSantis’s] g—— business!” if he, as a parent, wanted his child to have “gender-affirming care.” On Memorial Day weekend 2012, Hayes employed faux-intellectual gibberish to libel fallen troops, saying that he didn’t want to refer to them as “heroes” because he felt “uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’ because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.” Last week, Hayes nodded solemnly as Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, claimed without evidence that Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was “known to be a white supremacist.” Democratic operative Michael LaRosa, a former MSNBC producer, sounded off in response to the segment. “This shit has to stop,” he wrote. “Conversations and demonization like this are a big part of the reason we got our asses kicked.”
Fast-forward to election night, when anyone hate-watching MSNBC got the chance to watch Hayes lash out condescendingly at Trump voters and soothe distraught MSNBC viewers by claiming that “America didn’t give itself over to Trumpism.” For years, NBC News staff were baffled why such a terrible anchor occupied the prime 8 p.m. slot. Was it because MSNBC was just throwing in the towel because Tucker Carlson over on Fox was such a force? Tucker was fired, yet Chris remained. Was it because the all-powerful Maddow insisted that her lookalike Favorite be her lead-in? Maddow “semi-retired,” yet Chris remained. Now, as MSNBC enters the post-election, low-rated wilderness of backstabbing, blaming, and circular firing squads inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, will Chris remain yet again?
Further Reading: What I Learned at the MSNBC ‘Democracy’ Festival
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