Rambling about MSNBC

I saw this on Drudge.

MSNBC president Phil Griffin, whose cable news network is the only one among the big three to lose primetime viewers this season, told staffers he would look to turn things around by continuing a push for younger viewers in 2015.

Griffin, in a memo sent Monday, also promised “to get on the road — and outside of Washington” to broaden the network’s coverage.

“It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for msnbc,” Griffin wrote.

“We have a long history of finding and nurturing great talent — and with an eye toward 2016 — we continued to build our next generation of top-notch journalists,” Griffin wrote.

The memo then singled out such 20-something hosts as Ronan Farrow, Kasie Hunt and Alex Seitz-Wald.

The fact that I had to run Kasie Hunt, Mike’s brother, and Alex Two Names through the google machine tells me they need to keep looking for the next “great talent” to nurture. The only reason I know anything about that squealing sissy, Ronan Farrow, is he was fun to mock at one point. Clips of him having a hissy fit would turn up in my mailbox. If Frank were alive today, Ronan would not be.

It also touted Shift, MSNBC’s just-launched streaming news service, which “is already allowing us to reach new, younger audiences.”

MSNBC’s push to embrace youth makes sense for the only cable news network to see its primetime audience erode in the current season, as measured by Nielsen.

Its 548,000 primetime viewers age 2 and older — down 18 percent from the comparable season a year ago — ranked third to CNN’s 560,000 (up 15 percent) and Fox News Channel’s 1,845,000 (up 1 percent).

Viewers “2 and older”?? You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact there’s a metric for toddlers left in front of the TV while mommy gets another glass of wine says that TV ratings are mostly bullshit. Regardless, in a country with over 100 million cable homes, getting one half of one percent to tune in says you’re about as appealing as ass cancer. There’s no way to spin those numbers.

This is why a la carte pricing of cable should be at the top of the conservative agenda. MSNBC would not exist without cable fees. If people could drop it, everyone would and 99% of the money to this outfit would disappear. The same is true of CNN. Fox would make it because they have a solid audience with money to buy stuff. The ad dollars would probably go up for Fox once the others folded. Just as Fox tries to play both sides of the street, competing news outlets would be forced to follow suit. The news would start to look like America.

This is a microcosm with what’s gone wrong on the professional right. They never understood the long game. Public sector unions were never about public sector workers. It was about taxing those workers to finance liberal causes. Grants to non-profits were never about charity. They are jobs programs for liberals, usually engaged in get out the vote activity. Up and down American society you see a skim. Wherever money changes hands, the Left is getting a cut to finance their operations. In that regard, they operate just like the Mafia.

The Feds finally broke the Mafia by cutting off their money. Tax laws turned out to be the best weapon. The annual audits of unions, pension funds and front companies made it impossible for the mob to make a living. The American Right needs to take the same view. Scott Walker paved the way in Wisconsin, of all places. Now that he has cut the Left off my from union money, the state is suddenly a lot less progressive.

5 thoughts on “Rambling about MSNBC

  1. I’m thinking the worst thing for MSNBC’s ability to “attract” younger viewers id FOX sending out Jessie Watters to quiz young folks on topical current events, replaying the stunning ignorance they cite that seems to be “in line” with what MSNBC caters to, and correcting their “data”.
    Of course, that doesn’t say much about the value received from education “system” either.

  2. Viewers “2 and older”?? You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact there’s a metric for toddlers left in front of the TV while mommy gets another glass of wine says that TV ratings are mostly bullshit.

    ==============

    Next thing they’ll starting tracking dogs that watch TV. Mine just LOVE nature shows

  3. In the UK, we have the BBC. We pay for this with what is called “the licence fee” which, oddly, is fixed by parliament. Usually, left-leaning parliaments (that’s just about them all, these days) tend to reward Al-beeb with extra monies, which is raised through the “licence fee” and even having a sniff of a TV in your home warrants you paying it. It is, apparently, the devil’s own job to prove that you don’t tune in ever if you have a device capable of receiving the Beeb’s malodorious output of bias and dumb-downdom.

    We call it the telly tax and thus we have a range of appalling shows (such as EastEnders, the Beeb’s flagship soap, has a whole community screaming and shouting at each other and if they had token islamists they would however never discuss going to Syria or bombing a tube station) and of course the news, which has a distinct, sneering bias against anything vaguely right-wing.

    By the way, you in the Sates will be delighted to know that often the Beeb’s news programs leads with some Obama announcement or other. Aircraft gone down somewhere in the world? Al-Beeb thinks we all want to know what El Presidente thinks about it.

    The good news is the fact we all have to pay for the telly tax means we get no ads in the output. apart from ads for Al-Beeb’s own publications or shows or what’s on other Beeb output channels. Asian music station? Yes, we have an ad for that. they even have ads for paying the telly tax easily via your bank, one of which features a gay couple clearly not enjoying the other’s taste in old films.

    Like we care, though folk used to say many years ago — alert for homophobia here — you didn’t have to bend over backwards to get on at the BBC, you had to bend over forwards. Of course, I merely report this and do not endorse such a terrible statement in any shape or form.

    Oh yes, and mixed race couples too appear often in these ads: Al-beeb loves a white woman and a black man being happy on screen. Not sure they are all that common in large swathes of the British Isles but al-beeb thinks you should look at that.

    So here we have a sneering, Obama worshipping TV channel which has so much leftward bias it is hilarious. UKIP is not, as you would expect, liked at all. On the other hand, the EU is quite nice apparently though as this is the default position of the supposedly three ‘main’ parties then it is hardly surprising.

    Incidentally, the Beeb is a founder member of a thing called Eurovision which 60 years ago seemed quite novel. Now it comprises an annual Eurovison song contest that may have once spawned Abba with ‘Waterloo’ but now has transexuals from places like Israel winning. Yes, it is a song contest and year after year Britain enters and gets virtually no votes while Serbia and Azerbaijan and Russia of course Israel (none of which i used to think were in Europe) getting popular acclaim. I understand Britain is begged to stay in because the UK delivers the biggest audience for the show, though we all now it is a stitch up where all the Slav countries vote for each other as do the Scandinavians and so on. They would rather vote for ireland than the UK.

    The Eurosong contest is the final insult. We have to pay for ‘free’ television, have biased reporting, programs with shouting and best of all, no one likes us.

  4. When I had a DishTV subscription, I’d occasionally sneak a peek at “Link TV”.

    They had a parade of crusading journalists presenting stories about voter fraud by Republicans, evildoings of coal and oil companies, climate change(naturally) and panels on torture. They hosted fawning interviews with Chomsky, Zinn and the like. Sensitive actor types would narrate their specials.

    They were very self congratulatory about being independent, non corporate reporters able to tell the “truth”. These statements prefaced donation requests. My take was they sounded a little defensive. In the nooks and crannies of their minds, they knew they were too loopy for mainstream journalism.

    They make MSNBC’s hosts look like Vulcans

  5. It’s so true, Leftist ideas and programs seem to always be subsidized one way or another. And you always get more of what you subsidize, hence the Leftist infection spreading its vileness everywhere.

    Memo to Phil Griffin: most of the “younger viewers” don’t watch much tv, period, never mind Ministry of Truth Department MSNBC.

Comments are closed.