Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC has been cut from five nights a week during prime time to just one night a week. It was replaced by “MSNBC Prime,” where guest hosts took over every other night during the week. Now, Alex Wagner hosts “Alex Wagner Tonight,” which takes over that time slot.
Maddow’s clear demotion shows that she didn’t get enough viewers. Wagner’s ratings have gone up a little bit, but her debut, which drew only about 2 million viewers, wasn’t great. This time slot was won by Hannity on Fox News, which had 3.1 million viewers.
With her one-day-a-week time slot, Maddow has seen a comeback. The Rachel Maddow Show averaged 2.39 million viewers, which was enough to get it into the top five shows in the hour of a month.
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Maddow signed a multi-year deal with NBCUniversal and MSNBC last year. This means that she can work on other projects, such as possible movies and TV shows, and that the show will not be ending.
Even though Maddow was demoted because her ratings were going down, her replacement isn’t getting as many viewers as she used to.
With “Alex Wagner Tonight,” MSNBC’s ratings dropped dramatically from 2021, when Maddow was in charge. Wagner’s show lost 50% of Maddow’s audience in the key advertising demo of 25-54-year-olds, dropping from an average of 304,000 demo viewers in 2021 to 151,000 demo viewers in 2022. Nielsen says that the number of viewers dropped by 34%, from 2.4 million to 1.6 million.
A former executive told CNN, “A 50 percent drop in the key 25-54 demo is a 50 percent drop in your billable viewer. Imagine running a store or restaurant and losing 50 percent of your billable customers. Not your looky-loos. Your paying customers.”
“The Rachel Maddow Show,” which now only airs on Mondays, is still the only cable news show that isn’t Fox News to make it into the top 10 for both total viewers and viewers in the key demo.
Rachel Maddow’s demotion seemed inevitable, but all left-leaning news networks are in decline, which is making executives rethink how they present the nightly news.
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