MSNBC, the perennial third-place news network, began to gain traction when it positioned itself as an unabashedly liberal echo chamber, even adopting the telling slogan, “Lean Forward.”
Now, MSNBC is in the midst of a catastrophic ratings collapse–and has been for months. February 2015 lost nearly half the viewers they had, compared to February 2014. They’ve always ranked far below Fox News, but now they’ve even fallen below struggling CNN and CNN’s perennially-losing sister channel, HLN (formerly Headline News.)
As MSNBC looks to turn things around, it’s clear that one thing in particular has to go: it’s far-Left bias. Though MSNBC tried to mimic Fox News’s clout among conservatives, they got the formula wrong. MSNBC dedicated 85% of its airtime to liberal opinion shows. Despite what the Left wants to believe about Fox, Fox generally only airs opinion shows in prime time–dedicating the bulk of its schedule to old-fashioned reporting.
So far, MSNBC has already axed its worst performing hosts–Joy Reid and Ronan Farrow–and replaced them with a two hour block hosted by Thomas Roberts, whose own show had previously been cancelled in 2014 due to disastrous ratings.
But with new NBC News chief, Andrew Lack, coming onboard in the beginning of April, even more heads are set to roll. Aside from “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Morning Joe,” sources say that every single program is at risk.
A high-level NBC insider, who has been intimately involved in the new plans, even went so far as to call the current lineup “a death wish.”
The reimagining of MSNBC will stop its sprint to the left, and focus on more news-driven programming–relying heavily on NBC News’s journalistic bench, rather than its own partisan talking heads.
As MSNBC continues to fall apart, it’s clear that, despite popular opinion, America isn’t quite ready to “Lean Forward” to the Left’s skewed view of American politics.
