No one is watching MSNBC – at least not near as many as they'd like – and Salon finds this troubling.
The unashamedly liberal cable news network has seen its ratings sink to fourth place behind Fox News Channel, CNN and HLN. May 13-17 was MSNBC's lowest-rated week since summer 2006.
Salon's Alex Pareene goes through a few theories behind the slide.
Deadline Hollywood has tied the slide to Obama's recent wave of scandals. When fans of Obama got dispirited about the president's troubles they didn't feel like watching political talk, and the home for talk from their perspective is MSNBC. Fox, on the other hand, experienced an upswing because Obama foes were happy to tune in and gloat.
Pareene doesn't buy it.
Rather, he asserts, liberals just don't care about politics since it isn't an election year. After all, just last year MSNBC was challenging Fox on some nights.
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" is all politics, Pareene notes, while other morning shows are mostly a mixture of weather and fluff stories.
But "'Morning Joe,' instead of entertainment news updates, has a former member of Congress wave a newspaper at Mark Halperin for a while," he writes.
If MSNBC wants to get Fox News' audience numbers, Pareene says, they'll have to get young liberals to care about politics every day, every year, like old conservatives do.
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