Rachel Maddow took a much-deserved victory lap on Tuesday night after it was reported that her show – and MSNBC as a whole – rose to the top of cable ratings, while Fox News continued to hemorrhage viewers.
As PoliticusUSA’s Jason Easley noted earlier in the day, not only is Maddow’s program the number one most-watched show on the number one most-watched cable news network, but Sean Hannity’s viewership is down 31 percent and Fox & Friends has tanked by 40 percent.
“It is a really big deal for us, and I’m really thankful to you for watching this show,” the MSNBC host said on Tuesday night. “We will keep doing our best to be worthy of your time and your trust for you tuning in.”
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“It is a really big deal for us, and I’m really thankful to you for watching this show,” Rachel Maddow says following the news that MSNBC is the number one network on cable for the first time ever. #maddow pic.twitter.com/jOc5Uhhocz
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) March 3, 2021
Maddow said:
In January, for the first time ever, this show was the number one most-watched show on all of cable television, which is crazy, right? Not just the most-watched show on cable news but the most-watched show in all of cable TV, everything. That was in January, which was flummoxing and I thought absolutely was a fluke. But then today, we learned that we did it for a second month in a row. It turns out we were the most-watched show on all of cable TV for both January and February, which I have no idea what to make of. But even better than that, for February, for this past month, not only were we the most-watched show on cable, but our network, this network, MSNBC, was the most watched network in all of cable TV in the month of February, which is the first time that has ever been true for us as a network since we came into existence nearly 25 years ago. So if you know me, if you’ve ever seen the show, you know that I don’t talk about ratings and cable news wars and all that stuff, so I’m not going to dwell on this, I will not mention it again. But it is a really big deal for us, and I’m really thankful to you for watching this show. I had no idea there would ever be so many of you watching. It does blow my mind personally, but I am so grateful and humbled. Thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for supporting MSNBC. We will keep doing our best to be worthy of your time and your trust for you tuning in.
Trump killed Fox News
Fox News was instrumental not only in helping Donald Trump become president in the first place, but also in creating an alternate reality for the MAGA cult.
In a world without Fox News, it is unlikely that a president as blatantly corrupt and incompetent as Donald Trump would have lasted a full term in the White House.
Toward the end of his presidency, however, the Trump-Fox love affair started to wither as the ex-president’s delusions became too extreme even for the right-wing propaganda network to humor.
As a consequence, Trump began treating Fox News the way he has treated other cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC, and he told his supporters to flock to extremist outlets like OANN and Newsmax.
Donald Trump helped kill the network that elevated him to the highest office in the land.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
