Nowhere has liberal viewers’ backlash been sharper than at the cable network MSNBC.
Despite a bump immediately after the debate, MSNBC’s primetime ratings have dropped in the subsequent weeks, presumably following a long-held pattern in cable news that when a party’s viewers see discord among their own ranks, they tend to tune out the news. For the week of 7/1, MSNBC garnered just 55,000 viewers between the ages of 25 to 54 years old, tied for the network’s lowest average week in the demo since 2000.
Two people at MSNBC said that network executives were concerned about those numbers, though July tends to be one of the worst months for television news ratings (in a grim turn, the attempted assassination of Trump is almost certain to boost TV news ratings during the RNC next week).
During her show on Wednesday, host Nicolle Wallace acknowledged the awkwardness of reporting the news when the network’s viewership was clearly not happy to hear it.
“I know how difficult this story is for my audience. But I’m not going to shield anyone from the news,” she said. Before leading into a segment on Vice President Kamala Harris’ viability to assume the nomination should Biden step aside, Wallace added, “People are already going to be so angry that we are having this conversation. We may as well go there.”
The network’s programming also reflects some fissures in the anti-Trump coalition. Some like host Chris Hayes have said that Biden has “done nothing wrong” but acknowledged that he appears “increasingly likely to lose.” Others have said that the media’s coverage of Biden has been unfair: Lawrence O’Donnell, one of Biden’s favorite hosts on the network, said the White House press corps was at its “absolute worst” this week in its coverage of Biden’s health.
There is also some discomfort within MSNBC over the comparisons between its flagship Morning Joe program and Trump-era Fox and Friends, one of the former president’s favorite shows.
As I first reported in 2022, hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and regular commentator Mike Barnicle all have close personal ties with the president and other members of the administration. (The Brzezinski family has a decades-long relationship with the Bidens; her father the diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski was close to Biden; her brother Mark Brzezinski is US Ambassador to Poland).
In recent weeks, political insiders have been watching the show obsessively to see whether its hosts will encourage Biden to step aside. While Scarborough has seemed to waver since the debate, Brzezinski has become one of the more vocal skeptics of the push for a new nominee.
The New York Times has also sought to balance its criticism of the president with the concerns of some of its readers. After the Times editorial board called for Biden to step aside in the wake of his poor debate performance, Biden-supporting readers asked why the paper hadn’t made such a proclamation about Trump. On Thursday, the paper followed up its Biden piece with an even stronger condemnation of the Republican candidate.
In an email to Semafor, New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander rejected criticism from both liberals and the notion that said liberals were punishing the paper and canceling subscriptions en masse.
“As an independent news organization, people turn to us to cover the events of the world as they are, not as they want them to be,” he said. “In fact, audiences count on us to do so, especially during periods of important and developing news. We’ve found that the appetite for independent journalism increases during important news moments, despite the sentiments put forward by vocal critics.”