Last March, MSNBC went through a big shake-up, with several hosts being reassigned or fired. The network had been bleeding viewers since the 2024 election, and executives were desperate to stop it.
They begged their top-rated host, Rachel Maddow, to return to a five-night-a-week schedule. Maddow had stepped away from hosting her show to pursue “other projects,” and had limited her appearances to every Monday.
Maddow agreed to return to hosting five nights a week, but only for Trump’s first 100 days. To fill the huge hole in the coveted 9:00 PM EST time, the network brought in former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
The liberal base that makes up MSNBC’s primary audience was not pleased.
Jen Psaki was a brilliant WH Press Secretary but she has not reached that same level of brilliance in her roles on msnbc. Rachel doesn’t want the full-time M-F gig, so here we are with the network trying to figure it out.
— LetThereBePeaceOnEarth (@PJsports60) April 24, 2025
Maddow was a bombthrower. Psaki is far more restrained in her presentation. That’s not what the leftist hysterics want to see. They want blood, and Psaki, while a rabid partisan, doesn’t deliver the hammer blows quite like Maddow.
This was reflected in the first Neilson ratings from Psaki’s show.
However, the ratings from the first two episodes of “The Briefing” are likely not what executives were hoping for. The first episode, which may have benefited from curiosity from Maddow viewerrs,drew in roughly 1.2 million viewers, with 139,000 in the coveted 25-54-year-old demo, taking the first spot for that demo during primetime programming on Tuesday. On Monday, Ms. Maddow had 1.7 million viewers, of which 155,000 were in the demo.
During her last full week of work at the end of April, Ms. Maddow saw days where she drew in more than 2 million viewers.
Sadly, on Wednesday, Ms. Psaki’s premier show saw its audience shrink to just over 1 million. The audience in the 25-54-year-old age range plummeted 53 percent to just 65,000, only 40 percent of Ms. Maddow’s demo rate on Monday.
“The Briefing” also lost 67% of viewers in the 18-49 demo after only one episode as the show only averaged 37,000 viewers on Wednesday.
It gets worse for Psaki and MSNBC.
Psaki’s Wednesday episode was outdrawn by 38 different cable news offerings among the advertiser-coveted demo despite the cushy timeslot. MSNBC’s 9 p.m. ET program was outdrawn by everything Fox News Channel had to offer, along with 13 different CNN shows and seven MSNBC programs.
“Please Rick, make it stop.”
Not a chance.
On Wednesday, Psaki’s “The Briefing” also had fewer viewers among adults aged 25-54 than various repeats of “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Bob’s Burgers,” “The King of Queens” and “That 70s Show,” along with Nickelodeon’s “Paw Patrol,” Hallmark’s “Reba” and TLC’s “My Strange Addiction,” and many other basic cable offerings.
Historically, if a TV show gets off to this kind of rocky start, it’s not long for the airwaves. But this is MSNBC, and if more than a clutch of radicals tune in to watch, the embattled executives will portray it as a rousing success.
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