Speaker 1: All right.
A couple of media stories that I want to discuss with you.
There is a very interesting realignment happening in the wake of Tucker Carlson's firing from
Fox News and, of course, the Dominion.
Nearly $800 million settlement obtained from Fox, as well as the firing on CNN of CEO Chris
Licht after only a year, which included a number of very strange programing decisions.
Newsweek is now reporting MSNBC dethroned Fox News after years long ratings dominance.
Fox News his yearslong streak of rating dominance has ended, with new data showing it ceding
the top spot to its rival network, MSNBC.
Nielsen data regarding the week ending this past Sunday was shared on Twitter by A.J.
Katz, a reporter specializing in the cable news business.
According to the data, Fox's primetime 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern viewership averaged 1.504
million.
The average viewership for the more left leaning MSNBC over the same time frame averaged 1.52
million.
Narrowly beating out the conservative network that has long been a leader in cable news
viewership.
There are a lot of important things to discuss here.
First and foremost, this is a very small margin of victory for MSNBC.
And I do want to remind everybody that I couch this story not as I'm cheering about MSNBC.
MSNBC is a corporate media outlet, just like all the others that has chosen a center left
very establishment Democratic Party editorial position.
It's well to my right, it's not super exciting.
There's a media story here, and I want people to understand that it's a media story totally
separate from my particular political views.
MSNBC is being helped significantly right now by, number one, the fiasco and disaster
at Fox News, in which Fox was exposed in court for lying to their audience in order to get
ratings on the basis of playing coy and in many cases overtly supporting Donald Trump's
false claims that he won the 2020 election.
To further conservative talking points to maintain access to Republicans in power by
repeating or allowing them to repeat uncritically their talking points, that has been really
bad for Fox News, the firing of Tucker, etc.
We then have CNN.
CNN with a disastrous year with now fired former CEO Chris Licht at the helm.
And so MSNBC truly has benefited from problems suffered by Fox News and by CNN.
What this actually means for the future of 24 hour news media remains an open question,
with fragmentation of the audience.
Thanks to streaming and to some degree, independent media like our show and so many others that
are available asynchronously online in podcasts, YouTube, tik-tok, etc. form with a desire
from audiences for a different type of presentation that maybe feels a little less corporate and
a little more intimate in some way.
This little blip in which Fox is down and MSNBC is up may remain or it may not as far
as cable news ratings are concerned.
But my prediction is that other forms of news media and political analysis are going to
continue growing as a share of the total news media audience.
Now, you might say, well, David, you would like that, right?
Because you benefit from that.
We're doing fine already.
We don't need to grow anymore.
Everything's fine.
It's and I'm not even saying the David Pacman show is what's going to grow necessarily.
It's a question about the direction of people's tastes and appetites.
And there's a real question mark now, the next 18 months or how many months do we have?
Five and 12, 17 months, the next 17 months, not even 16 and a half months leading up to
the 2024 election are going to be extraordinarily important in seeing what niches different
media outlets choose.
We don't know what Fox is going to do from here on out.
We also don't know what MSNBC is going to do, but very interesting nonetheless.