The network that saw its ratings climb while wildly speculating about President Donald Trump’s downfall has fallen after the special counsel’s report was dropped and no further indictments were recommended.
MSNBC saw a swift decline in ratings Monday night after Attorney General William Barr released a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings, according to the Daily Beast.
“[Rachel] Maddow, who has consistently vied for the first or second top-rated cable news program, was sixth on Monday evening, down almost 500,000 total viewers from the previous Monday, as was MSNBC’s second top-rated program in primetime, ‘The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell,’” the outlet reported.
MSNBC, along with parent company NBC, CNN, and other legacy media outlets and newspapers, hyped the special counsel’s investigation for two years, leading their viewers to believe the President of the United States had committed treason and colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. That narrative played well with their liberal audiences, who were still bitter that preferred candidate Hillary Clinton did not win in 2016.
Naturally, Beast writers refer to Barr’s summary as “the Barr report” along with MSNBC in order to downplay its significance, since Trump nominated the attorney general. Mueller’s office rarely provided comment to the media about the ongoing investigation, but when Buzzfeed News published a story claiming former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was directed by the president to lie to congress, the special counsel said the report was “not accurate.”
Sources also told The New York Times and The Washington Post that Cohen did not make such a claim to the special counsel.
One has to wonder, if Barr’s summary was so far out of line of what Mueller discovered during his investigation, wouldn’t he have come out by now to dispute the summary? Of course, this obvious fact is ignored by those who are still clinging to hope that Mueller found something that should have led to Trump’s indictment or impeachment but was left out of Barr’s summary to protect the president.
Sources within MSNBC told the Beast they weren’t worried and that they would now “pivot to 2020.”
“This stuff ebbs and flows,” a network insider told the Beast. “I think we’re ebbing.”
The network now appears to hope, according to the Beast, that their audience’s ongoing hatred of Trump will carry them until the 2020 election.
“The hope now is that Trump’s conduct as president, along with the ramping up of the 2020 presidential campaign, will prove powerful storylines that will give MSNBC the opportunity to regroup. Hayes led his show Tuesday night with an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg about the Trump administration’s decision to pursue yet another repeal of Obamacare,” the Beast wrote.
While MSNBC ratings were down, Fox News ratings were up, even though the latter network has consistently performed at or near the top even during the Mueller investigation.