MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has been demoted by her network back from her primetime show five nights a week to just one night a week. The network replaced it with “MSNBC Prime” where it rotated guest hosts the other four weeknights. That slot has since been replaced by “Alex Wagner Tonight” hosted by Alex Wagner.
Maddow’s clear demotion is a reflection of insufficient ratings, Wagner has shown a slight uptick in ratings although her debut which drew an estimated 2 million viewers was underwhelming. That slot is Fox News’ Hannity which still handily won the timeslot with 3.1 million viewers.
With her one-day-a-week time slot, Maddow has seen a resurgence as The Rachel Maddow Show averaged 2.39 million viewers, enough to break into the top five shows in the hour of a month.
Maddow signed a multi-year agreement with NBCUniversal and MSNBC last year, which will allow her to develop other projects, including potential film and television series and means the show is going nowhere.
Although the demotion was because of a rating decline Maddow’s successor is failing to garner the audience the former once did.
With “Alex Wagner Tonight” MSNBC saw a stunning year-over-year drop from 2021, when Maddow hosted. In the key 25-54 advertising demo, Wagner’s show lost 50% of Maddow’s audience, sinking from an average in 2021 of 304,000 demo viewers to 151,000 in 2022. And in total viewers, the numbers were down 34%, from 2.4 million to 1.6 million, according to Nielsen.
“A 50 percent drop in the key 25-54 demo is a 50 percent drop in your billable viewer,” a former executive told CNN. “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 airs only on Mondays now, is still the only non-Fox News show to break into the top 10 cable news shows in terms of both total viewers and viewers in the key demo.
The Rachel Maddow demotion seemed inevitable but the decline of all of the left-leaning news networks is happening across the board and forcing executives to rethink how they present their nightly news.
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