TUESDAY: What kinds of ratings did Joy Reid get?

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Let's take a look at the record: We almost never watched Joy Reid's MSNBC program, which has now been canceled. There's a bit of a backstory there.

When we started this site in 1998, an individual could actually watch every cable news / PBS program of consequence.  There simply weren't that many such shows on the air.

It's very different now. Today, we Americans suffer under an around-the-clock assault from a three-way "cable news" Babel, and from mountains of messaging from other types of platforms.

The madness is everywhere—and it's very big business. You have to pick which programs to monitor. It isn't obvious to us that this three-way, round-the-clock Babel ius a madness which can be survived.

That's part of the reason why we rarely watched The ReidOut. As to why the program has been canceled, a key set of numbers looked like this as of last Thursday night:

Viewers aged 25-54, 7 p.m. Eastern, 2/20/25
The Ingraham Angle (Fox News Channel): 389,000
Erin Burnett OutFront (CNN): 104,000
The ReidOut with Joy Reid (MSNBC): 59,000

59,000 viewers? Most amazingly, barely half the number of Erin Burnett? Less than one-sixth the number of Ingraham?

That 59,000 strikes us as an astonishing number. Meanwhile, silly and amazing as it may seem, everyone seems to agree that this relatively narrow slice of the viewership pie is actually "the coved 25-54 demographic"—the demographic everyone cares about.

In this corporate material world, access to that demographic is routinely said to be coveted by advertisers. It's therefore said to be crucial to a channel's financial success.

At any rate, those were the numbers for "the coveted 25-54 demographic" Last Thursday night, the overall viewership numbers looked like this:

Total viewers, 7 p.m. Eastern, 2/20/25
The Ingraham Angle (Fox News Channel): 3.44 million
Erin Burnett OutFront (CNN): 550,000
The ReidOut with Joy Reid (MSNBC): 778,000

That too was a terrible number. The number from the "coveted" slice of the viewership was much worse.

We'd assume this is part of the reason for MSNBC's decision. Beyond that, we'd be inclined to assume that there were points of concern within the network concerning Reid's content.

Her content was routinely mocked on programs like Gutfeld! It wasn't always especially hard to do.

Rachel Maddow is irate today, and she's filled with praise for Reid's moral and intellectual greatness. That said, Maddow herself never adopts the kinds of racial stances which often came from Reid's program. We find ourselves wondering if the major star of Blue America's channel is protesting a bit too much, or simply in a slightly puzzling fashion.

Why did MSNBC make the decision in question? We have no way of knowing.

That said, the channel's numbers are extremely poor. Last Thursday night, lowly CNN outperformed MSNBC in the coveted demographic for four consecutive hours, starting at 5 p.m.  

Reid had been in her time slot for almost five years, and her numbers were very poor.

Tomorrow, we may report on the matter of MSNBC and "The Uterus Collector." NPR has already reported the news. As of this morning, few other major orgs had.

For today, we the people are in fact living in a material world. The cable news channel we Blues tend to favor is a corporate business venture. If a channel like that can't attract viewers, in theory it can't survive.

Also, it can't produce change! A cable news channel can't change the world if it turns out that nobody's watching its programs—or at least, so the experts have said.