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There was a lot of backlash after Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealed they met with President-elect Donald Trump after his election win in November, but did the meeting impact ratings?
While many viewers swore they’d stopped watching the MSNBC morning news program in light of the Trump news, the viewing figures suggest the drop hasn’t been as significant as the headlines made it seem.
According to Mediaite, Morning Joe‘s ratings have remained relatively steady since the election. The 6 am hour of the Monday, November 20 episode, where the hosts discussed their meeting with Trump, brought in 839,000 total viewers and 113,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demographic.
The same hour on Tuesday dropped to 680,000 total viewers and 76,000 in the key demo, while the overall episode saw an 11 percent drop in total viewers and a 12 percent drop in the demo. While this looks significant on paper, when looking at the full week before the Trump meeting and the week after, the ratings remained fairly stable.
As reported by Mediaite, during the week of the announcement, Morning Joe averaged 691,000 total viewers, which was only a 1.7% decline from the previous week’s average of 703,000. That said, both weeks were down a lot from the show’s previous quarter average of 1.14 million viewers.
Despite this, Morning Joe hasn’t dropped as much as other MSNBC shows. Between the third quarter (pre-election and Trump meeting) and November, Morning Joe lost 14% of its audience. In comparison, the network’s prime-time 9 pm hour hosted by Alex Wagner (and Rachel Maddow on Mondays) was down 32%.
In addition, Chris Hayes was down 15%, Joy Reid 30%, and Lawrence O’Donnell 24%. Nicolle Wallace, the usual ratings leader for the network, was also down some 14%.
News networks, in general, are down post-election, with MSNBC down 47% and CNN down 33%. On the week of the Trump meeting announcement, even Fox News saw a small 9% dip. Meanwhile, in prime time, MSNBC lost 52% of its viewers, while CNN dropped 39%.
According to The Daily Beast, a source at MSNBC told the publication that they expected a ratings dip after the election, and they think viewing figures will go back up once Trump is officially sworn in in January.
Morning Joe, Weekdays, 6a/5c, MSNBC