The 2024 presidential election not only saw Trump being sent back to the White House, it also may bring about the end of the left’s stranglehold on the mainstream media.
Perhaps you've heard that MSNBC, which is perhaps the worst of the worst when it comes to left-wing bias, has seen a much-deserved huge ratings tumble since the 2024 elections. You've seen the clips of their election night meltdowns, so you get it.
According to a report from The Daily Beast “The liberal network’s viewership is down by 47 percent overall” since Election Day, “and by 52 percent during primetime, the latest Nielsen ratings show.”
Sources at the notoriously left-wing network claim that the post-election dip was expected, and they anticipate viewership to go back up after the inauguration. MSNBC’s troubles are not shared by all. Fox News, for example, experienced a significant surge in ratings since the election.
MSNBC’s post-election drop is worse than in 2016, when the network’s ratings fell for two straight weeks following Trump’s initial win. The severity of the decline has raised questions about the network’s ability to retain its audience.
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The morning show "Morning Joe" has been hit particularly hard. After co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited Mar-a-Lago to “extend an olive branch to president-elect Donald Trump,” the program’s ratings dropped by 38%. Other shows have also seen historic lows, particularly in the crucial 25-to-54 age demographic.
Meanwhile, many liberal viewers appear to be actively disengaging from political news. One MSNBC fan toldThe Washington Post that he “switched off the network the day after the election because [he] couldn’t stand the Democratic infighting that immediately erupted after Trump’s surprisingly swift victory.” Others compared following Trump’s transition to watching a “sequel to a horror film.” A voter quoted by the Post said, “I don’t need to hear the day-to-day preparations about what they’re doing to strip away rights for millions of Americans every day.”
With MSNBC struggling, Elon Musk has toyed with the idea of buying the network—though at the moment, it’s not exactly for sale, but neither was Twitter when Musk floated the idea of buying it.
The possibility shouldn’t be dismissed. Just as the Democratic Party has some soul-searching to do, so should liberal media outlets that have built an audience around its hateful anti-Trump and anti-GOP rhetoric only to have it blow up in their faces.
Fox News is thriving at the moment, having experienced a 24% increase in primetime viewership since Trump’s victory. A similar thing happened after Trump’s 2016 win, though the network saw a decline in viewers after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory—though a lot of that was driven by anger over the network’s early call of Georgia for Joe Biden. Still, their ratings recovered in time. It remains to be seen whether MSNBC will ever recover. According to The Daily Beast, some researchers attribute the drop it MSNBC’s ratings to “liberal voters feeling defeated and resigned” and seeking to “lower their blood pressure” by tuning out the news entirely.
It looks like there is certainly a market for more balanced options, and this might be a prime opportunity to break up the left’s monopoly on the mainstream media.
I hope Elon Musk is seriously considering buying MSNBC and that it can happen. Left-wing media outlets have radicalized so many in this country, we need more balanced networks to deprogram the radical left.
