Fresh embarrassment for struggling MSNBC as new line up leads to disastrous ratings drop

MSNBC Faces Major View­er­ship Decline Fol­low­ing Prime­time Shake­up

MSNBC is expe­ri­enc­ing a sharp decline in view­er­ship just weeks after rolling out a revamped prime­time line­up aimed at revers­ing its down­ward rat­ings trend.

Accord­ing to Medi­aite, the net­work has seen a 41% drop in its prime­time 25–54 age demo­graph­ic and a 34% decline in total day view­er­ship com­pared to May 2024.

This marks a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge for Jen Psa­ki, who began host­ing the 9 p.m. slot Tues­day through Fri­day on May 5, replac­ing long­time anchor Rachel Mad­dow dur­ing those nights. Mad­dow, who remains a high-pro­file pres­ence on the net­work, con­tin­ues to host Mon­days only.

Despite Maddow’s con­fi­dence that Psa­ki could out­per­form her, ear­ly rat­ings tell a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. On May 22, Psaki’s pro­gram, The Brief­ing with Jen Psa­ki, drew few­er than 1 mil­lion total view­ers, while Han­ni­ty on Fox News brought in 2.3 mil­lion dur­ing the same time slot. Psa­ki also under­per­formed in the key demo­graph­ic, attract­ing just 55,000 view­ers aged 25–54, com­pared to Hannity’s 210,000.

In addi­tion to Psaki’s pro­gram, MSNBC debuted a new 7 p.m. pan­el show, The Week­night, fea­tur­ing Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, and Ali­cia Menen­dez. The show, which replaced The Rei­d­Out after Joy Reid’s depar­ture ear­li­er this year, aver­aged 770,000 view­ers—down 36% from the 1.2 mil­lion that tuned into MSNBC in that slot last year. Only 56,000 view­ers from the key demo tuned in on May 22.

Since launch­ing, Psaki’s show has aver­aged 973,000 view­ers, a 46% decrease from the 1.82 mil­lion who watched the time slot dur­ing Maddow’s five-night-a-week run cov­er­ing the ear­ly Trump pres­i­den­cy. Com­pared to Alex Wagner’s per­for­mance in the same slot last year, Psaki’s view­er­ship is also down 20%.

Even Maddow’s own Mon­day pro­gram is see­ing a down­turn. Since the line­up changes, she has aver­aged 1.8 mil­lion view­ers, a 24% decline from last year’s 2.4 mil­lion.

While CNN con­tin­ues to trail Fox News over­all, it has man­aged to out­per­form MSNBC in the key 25–54 demo­graph­ic in most time slots, aside from Abby Phillip’s 10 p.m. show.

Fox News remains the dom­i­nant play­er in cable news. The Five is its top-rat­ed pro­gram and leads all cable news shows with an aver­age of 3.77 mil­lion night­ly view­ers in May. Over­all, Fox post­ed a 21% increase in total view­ers and a 22% gain in the key demo com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year.

MSNBC’s inter­nal chal­lenges extend beyond rat­ings. In April, Steve Kor­nac­ki, known for his data-dri­ven elec­tion cov­er­age, announced he was step­ping down from MSNBC to focus sole­ly on par­ent com­pa­ny NBC News. He will con­tribute to Meet the Press, Today, NBC Night­ly News, and NBC News Now.

Addi­tion­al­ly, The Beat host Ari Mel­ber is report­ed­ly con­sid­er­ing leav­ing the net­work and pos­si­bly launch­ing his own media ven­ture. Mel­ber, who has host­ed the 6 p.m. show since 2017 and also serves as MSNBC’s chief legal cor­re­spon­dent, has cul­ti­vat­ed a sig­nif­i­cant dig­i­tal following—an asset viewed as cen­tral to the network’s future strat­e­gy under new lead­er­ship from Rebec­ca Kut­ler.

Mean­while, Comcast’s deci­sion to spin off MSNBC into a pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­ny adds fur­ther uncer­tain­ty to the network’s future as it works to regain view­er trust and sta­bi­lize its prime­time line­up.