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THE COMING CRISIS AT CNN AND MSNBC. A few days before he took office in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump called himself a “ratings machine.” All through the next four years, he reminded television news organizations that their ratings depended in some large part on the daily excitement he generated from the White House. He was right. And now, in Trump’s final month in office, CNN and MSNBC, which virtually re-invented themselves as Resistance TV, are wondering what comes next.
“CNN and MSNBC Fret Over Post-Trump Future,” reads the headline in the New York Times. The paper reports that both networks have seen ratings boosts in the six weeks since the election, but they worry about what comes after January 20, when President Trump leaves and Joe Biden takes office. “People at both networks know that viewers who abhorred President Trump may no longer need their nightly therapy sessions with Rachel Maddow or Don Lemon,” the paper notes.
And it’s not just the opinion hosts. There are news anchors at both networks who have turned their programs into long sessions of anger, snark, and attitude, all directed at Trump. MSNBC, in particular, defined itself as a Resistance organization. Its audience loved to watch the network’s news and opinion hosts talk about Russia, Trump’s taxes, impeachment, Stormy Daniels, or whatever anti-Trump topic they chose to lead the news with.
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But the Times reports that MSNBC’s executives soon learned that their fortunes rose and fell with Trump. They rose when Trump was in trouble, and they fell when he was doing well. “Producers watched in amazement as ratings nose-dived during ‘good news periods’ for President Trump,” the Times reports. “Viewership dropped sharply, for instance, in the days after the report on Mr. Trump and Russia by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose conclusions came as a disappointment to many Democrats. MSNBC viewers also tuned out after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, and they largely skipped Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address in February, which took place when he was assured of an acquittal in a Senate impeachment trial.”
So what to do now? The answer is suggested later in the Times story. Some at MSNBC see a big ratings drop ahead. But “others at the network say that Trumpism — with its attendant partisanship and politicization of society — will persist, keeping viewers locked in even after Mr. Trump is no longer in the White House,” the Times writes.
That’s the ticket! MSNBC can simply pretend that Donald Trump is president for the indefinite future. It can avert its eyes from the goings-on in the new Biden administration and focus instead on the outrages of “Trumpism” that MSNBC will surely find throughout our politics. It will be as if President Trump never left. Trump can help that along by maintaining a high profile.
One comparison, from years ago. Back in the 1990s, cable news, meaning mostly CNN and CNBC, was obsessed with the O.J. Simpson murder case. It started with the murder of Simpson’s ex-wife and a friend of hers in June 1994 and lasted until Simpson was acquitted in October 1995. The trial, in particular, dominated hours and hours and hours of talk each day. So what to do when it was over? The answer was simple: Act as if the case were still going on. Just keep talking about O.J. That went on for a very long time. So that might be the future for MSNBC, and perhaps at CNN, too. Otherwise, what will Nicolle Wallace and her many Trump-obsessed colleagues talk about?
