After Two Years of Mueller Coverage Flops, Maddow’s Ratings Take a Brutal Hit
by C. Douglas Golden
On election night 2016, as it became clear Donald Trump would be ensconced in the White House for the next four years, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow delivered the most famous (and most febrile) peroration of her lengthy broadcast career.
“You’re awake by the way. You’re not having a terrible, terrible dream,” she told viewers. “Also, you’re not dead and you haven’t gone to hell. This is your life now. This is our election now. This is us. This is our country. It’s real.”
What liberals thought they were watching was Maddow’s phoenix-like rebirth after the Obama administration sapped most of her rage and some of her relevancy.
What they didn’t realize was that they were watching the incipient moments of a Howard Beale-esque transformation, a very polite version of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” all without the raincoat.
The next few years ought to have been fecund ground for Maddow. Opinion journalists tend to take on higher profiles when the other guys are in power, especially when the other guy was Donald Trump.
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The Mueller investigation should have taken her over the top. And while her ratings were high, the investigation also seemed to send her over the edge: Maddow’s Mueller coverage and myriad (wrong) predictions about Russian conspiracies and the imminent end of the Trump administration turned her into an Alexis Jones, a tinfoil haberdasher for the left set.
Well, after all that, you still may not be dead or have gone to hell. As of late, however, her ratings have.
“MSNBC primetime host Rachel Maddow brought in her worst weekly ratings of the year last week,” The Daily Caller reported Tuesday.
“Her show last week averaged 2,324,000 viewers, with an average audience of 337,000 in the 25-54 age demographic, both of which mark yearly lows for the liberal television host, according to Nielsen Media Research.”
The news outlet noted that the first sign of big ratings trouble was after the Attorney General William Barr released his four-page letter to Congress in which he noted there was no evidence of collusion and no conclusion on obstruction of justice.
“She spent two years dissecting every aspect of the special counsel’s investigation into whether President Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election,” the report noted. “The night Mueller submitted his findings to Barr, Maddow appeared to hold back tears over the fact that neither the president nor any family members were indicted.”
However, one might venture a guess that it wasn’t just that the circus has packed up and left town that’s given Maddow’s ratings a ding. It’s the fact that she still seems to be riding the Tilt-a-Whirl in her own mind — and even her ideological fellow travelers are taking notice.
full story at https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/two-years-mueller-coverage-flops-maddows-ratings-take-brutal-hit/