Ronan Farrow MSNBC - P 2014
Heidi Gutman/MSNBCContinued ratings woes at MSNBC got particularly bad for Ronan Farrow on Tuesday.
The host’s 1 p.m. Ronan Farrow Daily posted its lowest delivery among the targeted news demographic of adults 25-54 since launching almost a year ago. Pulling a paltry 11,000 viewers in the demo, MSNBC sank below even Al Jazeera America in the hour. AJAM’s News Live doubled Farrow’s performance with 22,000 — which isn’t anything to write home about either.
Read More An Open Letter to Phil Griffin
Farrow’s hourlong program launched last March to soft ratings, and they haven’t gained much since. Afternoons rarely rival mornings and evenings for cable news nets — but, by comparison, Fox News Channel’s Happening Now earned 202,000 adults 25-54 and CNN’s Wolf had 154,000 yesterday in the same time slot. (Ronan netted 158,000 total viewers.)
Live-plus-same-day returns from Nielsen also put MSNBC’s total day delivery with adults 25-54 at nearly a 10-year low on Feb. 3: just 55,000. The network’s bad day comes on the heels of its seventh consecutive month ranking third in the cable news race. It’s behind a rising CNN at No. 2 and FNC at No. 1.
MSNBC chief Phil Griffin acknowledged the network’s rough patch in December with a staff-wide memo. “Technology is continuing to drive unprecedented changes across the media landscape,” he wrote, “and we all should be taking a hard, honest look at how we need to evolve along with it.”
