The headlines around a certain cable news network’s astronomical drop in viewership are harrowing: In the weeks since the presidential election, the network’s primetime audience has fallen by about half, sparking scores of stories about a troubled operation.
MSNBC in 2024? Yes — but also Fox News in 2020, or CNN in 2016, and all three in 2012. The drop in viewership at MSNBC is very real: In the three weeks after the Nov. 5 election, the network averaged 661,000 primetime viewers, fewer than half of what it drew each night in October. Lost among the headlines and hand-wringing in media circles, though, is the fact that — to some extent, at least — craters like this pop up after every presidential election.
Since 2004, primetime ratings for CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have fallen off by an average of 38 percent in the month following an election compared to October of that year, based on an analysis of Nielsen ratings.
Fox News has bucked the trend so far this year, improving a little in primetime (it’s up by about 7 percent post-election versus its October average), while CNN has slid by 46 percent and MSNBC by 52 percent. Primetime coverage of the presidential election on Nov. 5 averaged 42.29 million viewers across 18 cable and broadcast networks from 7-11 p.m. ET, according to final same-day ratings from Nielsen. That’s a steep, 26 percent decline from four years ago, which drew 56.92 million viewers and was at the time the least watched Election Night since the ratings service began tallying total viewers in 2000.
CNN, Fox News and MSNBC took an even bigger hit on Election Night, falling by 31 percent compared with 2020 (21.43 million viewers vs. 31.13 million), though all three reported strong showings on their digital platforms. The post-election blahs are endemic across the big three cable news outlets, but the viewership numbers of individual networks can drop farther when the candidate seen as their ideological opposite wins. MSNBC’s current swoon resembles its numbers after Donald Trump won his first term in office in 2016, after which the network fell by 41 percent.
Four years ago, after Joe Biden unseated Trump and some right-leaning viewers (briefly) turned against Fox News for calling a key result in Arizona for Biden, its primetime audience fell by 49 percent in the month following the election compared with October 2020. CNN often bears the worst slide regardless of who wins, having slumped by 50 percent or more in three of the past five post-election periods. If past patterns hold, MSNBC and CNN will likely begin recovering some of their audiences in December and pick up again once the new administration takes office.
By March 2017, two months into Trump’s first term, CNN and MSNBC had regained most of their lost viewers, and MSNBC was running ahead of its pre-election audience. None of the above is to say that either network has rosy times ahead: MSNBC faces an uncertain future as parent company Comcast looks to spin it off along with several other cable properties, and CNN has been in a ratings slump for most of 2024, on top of the systemic issues (cord-cutting, streaming’s consistent rise) all cable networks face.
But at least in terms of the post-election ratings malaise, both have weathered that storm several times before.
This story first appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.