From Trump Bump to Trump Slump: Ratings suffer as liberals avoid news after election
Several outlets have seen ratings plummet following Donald Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris as some liberals have decided to tune out the news media and avoid updates on the president-elect.
MSNBC posted its lowest ratings in 25 years in the week following the 2024 presidential election with an average of 487,000 total viewers. CNN managed only 337,000 average total viewers to finish fifth among cable networks.
"It's depression. Fatigue. or some are just tired of being lied to with some of the most hyperbolic dishonest rhetoric you will ever see on any network. And there are so many other options for not just liberals but all news consumers out there in the form of podcasts or huge free speech platforms like X. Those viewers may not come back this time," Fox News contributor Joe Concha told Fox News Digital.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that liberals were turning off the news in their cars, on their phones and at home.
"I pretty much stopped on a dime," Brandon Wilson, a California professor, told the Washington Post of his news consumption after Harris lost. The outlet reported he regularly tuned into MSNBC on SiriusXM.
Wilson was particularly frustrated by the "the finger-pointing and bashing of the Democratic Party," in the days that followed Trump's win, according to the outlet.
"We’re all absorbing a lot about what this win is going to mean, and the last thing I need is a lot of things that raise my blood pressure," Wilson told the Post. "Like blaming the candidate for some obvious problems with the electorate, like misinformation and disinformation."
It's a far cry from the "Trump Bump" for the media after Trump's win in 2016, which stunned the world and particularly press outlets that confidently predicted a Hillary Clinton victory. Progressives and anti-Trumpers flocked to subscribe, tune in and listen to liberal newspapers, networks and podcasts in the four years that followed.
It's a different situation in 2024 where Trump's victory, while still surprising to some, is far less of a shock given how tight the race was and that he'd pulled it off before.
"I just don’t even want to know what kind of outrageous thing he’s going to do," Michelle Mullins said after telling the Post she started listening to audiobooks in lieu of news podcasts. "I’m resigned to, ‘He’s going to do outrageous things, and we’ll deal with it when he’s gone.’"
Andrew DelPonte told the Post that he read all the pages of Project 2025 before the election, but said he turned off his Apple News alerts, as well as stopped listening to NPR in the wake of the election.
"I don’t need to hear the day-to-day preparations about what they’re doing to strip away rights for millions of Americans every day," he told WaPo.
The New York Times' Ginia Bellafonte also wrote a column on New Yorkers tuning out the news and noted that it was clear in the cable news ratings. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's show on Nov. 11 had about half of the viewers it had in the month prior, she wrote.
Writer Emily Listfield told Bellafonte she was yelling at her phone while listening to liberal podcast "Pod Save America" the night after the election and realized it might be better for her to avoid her news sources.
"I was going to a movie with a friend last weekend, and she asked which of three releases I was interested in," she told the "Big City" columnist. "I had to explain that I couldn’t risk looking — opening the news app to see reviews — so she would have to summarize them for me."
MSNBC's four-hour long morning show, "Morning Joe," hosted by Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, has seen a drop in viewership following their announcement that they met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago after he was declared the winner.
Brzezinski, Scarborough and all of their daily guests regularly criticize Trump and have even likened him to a fascist dictator.
"Morning Joe" has averaged 1.1 million total viewers from 6-9 a.m. ET in 2024, but the Nov. 18 episode's audience fell to 769,000.
The audience shrunk again with 683,000 average total viewers tuning in on Tuesday, Nov. 19, and it shriveled even more on Wednesday when it averaged only 618,000 total viewers.
Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.