Nielsen Media

Trump Slobbers All Over OAN in a Crazed Rant Against the ‘Evil, Corrupt Media’

Posted by on August 31, 2021 at 11:34 am. 2 Comments :

A couple of weeks ago Donald Trump had his spokes-shill post a tweet for him that asked a simple question: “Do you miss me yet?” To which the majority of Americans would resoundingly reply, “How can we miss you if you won’t go away?” In the eight months since he lost so decisively to Joe Biden, Trump has been unable to keep his yap shut for a single day. Just like when he was still occupying the White House.

Donald Trump, OAN

Trump has been a non-stop outrage gusher whose inflammatory remarks pose a real threat to domestic tranquility of the nation. He has also been making the rounds of wingnut media with stops at his favorite fluffing stations (Fox News, Newsmax, etc.), and hosting his Coronavirus Superspreader Cult Rallies. One of his frequent media destinations is the One America News Network (OAN) where he appeared on Monday to gripe some more about what a victim he is. For a wannabe political messiah who tries to present a facade of strength, Trump sure whines an awful lot.

On this episode of Trump’s OAN bitch-fest, Trump continued his familiar and tedious attacks on the media with renewed vigor saying that it is “an evil, corrupt media, it’s corrupt as can be.” This is just Trump’s way of expressing his wrath for the press because they insist on telling the truth about him. But on this occasion he he also felt compelled to lavish praise on his OAN host:

“You guys are amazing. Your numbers are far better – I have to say this. OAN, your numbers are far better than anybody knows. They don’t do the Nielsen’s on your network. So many people are watching what you’re doing. The election fraud of 2020 is the single biggest thing they want to watch, and other networks don’t put it on because they’re afraid to put it on. Because they’ve been silenced.”

At this point it is useful to recall that Trump spent eleven years as the host of a reality television game show. So it is puzzling that he still knows less about how the Nielsen ratings work than a TV business apprentice.

The reason that OAN isn’t included in the Nielsen ratings isn’t because Nielsen is discriminating against them. It’s because OAN’s audience is too small to register any measurable numbers. But Trump’s Nielsen illiteracy shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that he repeatedly brags that his show was #1, when, in reality, it never rose higher than #7 (the premiere), spent most of its run out of the top 30, and languished at #113 by the finale.

What’s more, Trump’s delusion that most TV viewers are anxious to watch him grumbling about imaginary election fraud is downright deranged. The American people are bored to tears by his raving antics and polls show that they believe that Biden won the election fair and square and they want to move on. Trump previously tried to pressure Fox News to embrace his “Big Lie” about election fraud as a “ratings bonanza” without any success.

However, Trump may have a point that some networks are afraid of stories involving election fraud. Although, that is not because they are concerned about upsetting some omnipotent, status quo, authoritarians controlling the world. It’s because the claims are so transparently false that it makes them liable for multibillion dollar lawsuits like those already filed by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.

Trump loves OAN because they are one of the few outlets that continue to propagate the “Big Lie” that led to the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C., and threatens to incite more violence. In February OAN ran the crockumentary by the MyPillow Guy, Mike Lindell, that promised to provide “Absolute Proof” of election fraud (albeit with a hysterical disclaimer).

Needless to say, that promise went unfulfilled. But the promise of Trump’s relentless tantrums, slander, conceit, and flagrant lying is, unfortunately, still being carried out by Trump and his confederates at propaganda dispensers like OAN. If only he would go away so that at least his brain damaged cult disciples could finally miss him.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Obsessed Ego Maniac Trump Calls TV Ratings Declines ‘A Wonderful Thing to See’

Posted by on June 29, 2021 at 5:24 pm. 3 Comments :

Donald Trump, the former reality TV game show host, is once again obsessing over television ratings. It’s almost as if he still thinks he’s a TV personality, rather than the pathetic political loser who is now a senior resident of Palm Beach’s gaudy Mar-All-Ego retirement village in Florida.

Donald Trump TV Set

Trump’s fixation on TV ratings goes back a long ways. He has long regarded them as being a better indicator of popularity than public opinion polls. That may be because most polls consistently exposed his weakness and general disapproval with the public at large.

Trump literally said that TV ratings “are the real polls” despite the fact that Nielsen doesn’t measure popularity, just viewership. Which means they don’t record the political ideology of viewers.

Furthermore, TV ratings don’t account for the fact that Fox News only tops the ratings because it has a de facto monopoly on the cult-like right-wing audience, while the rest of the viewer universe is divided among all the other news and entertainment networks.

On Tuesday Trump issued one of his increasingly impotent statements (since he can no longer post on social media) that are mostly ignored by everyone but his dimwitted disciples. He said that…

“CNN ratings are down 70%. MSDNC is also way down. Actually, they are ALL way down. They say the news is ‘boring’ since I left D.C. Morning Joe, Joy Reid (whoever that is?), Nicole Wallace, Jake Tapper, and even Chris Wallace, at Fox, in free fall. A wonderful thing to see!”

Trump is surprisingly correct for once. Ratings for all of the cable news networks have declined year over year. According to Deadline…

“In primetime, Fox News topped with an average of 2.13 million viewers, compared to 1.31 million for MSNBC and 798,000 for CNN. Compared to the same month a year earlier, Fox News was off 42%, MSNBC was down 36% and CNN dropped 57%. In the 25-54 demo, Fox News drew an average of 329,000, down 50%; compared to 179,000 for CNN, falling 68%; and 166,000 for MSNBC, off by 48%.

“In total day, Fox News averaged 1.17 million in total viewers, down 35%; MSNBC posted 763,000, down 37% and CNN was at 580,000, down 49%. In the 25-54 demo, the numbers were 195,000 for Fox News, down 42%, 133,000 for CNN, falling 59% and 99,000 for MSNBC, dropping by 48%.”

However Trump doesn’t bother to explain why ratings have suffered. He simply implies that it’s because his unceasing lunacy is no longer a part of the daily circus that consumes the press. He’s at least partially correct. There are fewer viewers for the same reason that viewership declines after any other catastrophic event. Ratings spike when a hurricane ravages the eastern shore. Then they subside when the weather returns to normal. And Hurricane Trump has petered out.

In the big picture, the ratings for all of the cable news networks were expected to fall back from this time last year. In June of 2020 the nation was in the midst of a presidential election. The party conventions were approaching. And it isn’t insignificant to note that people were confined to their homes due to a deadly pandemic. Which was another Trump catastrophe that boosted news viewing.

Trump’s statement went out of its way to identify program hosts mostly from MSNBC. And the only one that he derisively insulted was Joy Reid, a Black woman. That’s a pretty good indicator of who and what he is most afraid of. But his last comment stating that these ratings declines are “A wonderful thing to see” reveals his hostility to the media that he has repeatedly referred to in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people.”

Like the totalitarian dictators he admires, Trump wants the media to fail. He regards a free press, and the Constitution that protects it, as an adversary. And any bad news for the media is good news for an aspiring tyrant like Trump. He actually confided his envy to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, telling him that he also would like to “get rid of” the press. And given the opportunity, don’t doubt that he wouldn’t try.

UPDATE: Fox News reported on the ratings decline of CNN and MSNBC, attributing it, without evidence, to a “credibility problem.” And speaking of credibility problems, for some reason Fox’s article never mentioned Fox News ratings at all, or that they had declines that were just as bad and, more often than not, worse.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump’s Nightmare: Biden Takes the Ratings Crown in Dueling Town Halls

Posted by on October 16, 2020 at 10:14 am. 3 Comments :

Friday is going to be another Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day for Donald Trump, whose days of late are mostly filled with disappointment, bitterness, anger, jealousy, and fear. With every new poll Trump is falling farther behind Joe Biden, both nationally and in the critical battleground states. Even his favorite pollster, the rabidly biased, right-wing Rasmussen, has Trump facing near certain defeat.

Donald Trump, Joe Biden

After chickening out of the second presidential debate, Trump plotted with NBC to schedule a town hall that would directly compete with the one previously scheduled with Joe Biden on ABC. There was a lot wrong with that decision on NBC’s part, and their poor judgement is not validated by this good news in the aftermath of both town halls (via Variety):

“Biden drew 12.7 million total viewers on the Disney-owned network, while Trump drew 10.4 million in the same 9-10 p.m. time slot on NBC. Across the entire runtime, the Biden town hall averaged 12.3 million viewers. In terms of the fast national 18-49 demographic, Biden is comfortably on top with a 2.6 rating to Trump’s 1.7.” [See updated numbers below]

Biden’s audience exceeded Trump’s by more than two million – 20%. [Note: these are preliminary ratings that will be updated later in the day]. That’s a significant victory that parallels Biden’s lead in both polling and fundraising. Biden pulled in a record $383 million in September, compared to Trump’s haul of only $247.8 million. But best of all, ratings are what Trump cares about more than anything else, and he has utterly failed in that arena. This will surely drive the Narcissist-In-Chief CRAZY(er).

[UPDATE: The total is now in for Trump’s town hall, including MSNBC and CNBC. The three networks combined drew 13.1 million viewers. So Biden’s town hall on ABC, whose final numbers are 14.1 million, still beat Trump by a million viewers]

There were additional differences between the the Trump and Biden town halls that are more substantive than ratings. While Biden made a couple of mistakes, Trump lied frequently in his town hall. He was also challenged – and failed – on issues like…

  • Refusing to renounce the QAnon domestic terrorists
  • Deliberate distortions of data concerning the coronavirus
  • His inability to recall whether he had taken a COVID-19 test prior to the first debate
  • His miniscule tax payments and to whom he owes more than $400 million
  • Disseminating conspiracy theories such as one about Biden killing SEAL Team 6

On that last matter Trump attempted to excuse himself by saying that “it was a retweet,” as if that makes any difference. It’s still Trump passing along a preposterous and dangerous lie. NBC’s moderator, Savannah Guthrie, called him out saying that “You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle that can just retweet whatever.”

All told, the night was a huge defeat for Trump. He embarrassed himself in his own town hall. He likely alienated even more voters. And worst of all, he was beaten up in the ratings by someone he says is a mentally deficient socialist. If Trump can’t even win against that sort of an opponent, what does that make him?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Fox News Ratings Continue to Sink During Month of Trump’s Impeachment Hearings

Posted by on November 27, 2019 at 12:39 pm. 3 Comments :

One of the most nauseating things about Donald Trump is how deliberately he has decimated the standards of honesty for the U.S. presidency. And while there is nothing he won’t lie about, his falsehoods are frequently employed to boost his own fragile ego. This is a man who began his term by lying about the size of his inauguration audience. He lies about his popularity among Republicans. He routinely lies about the attendance at his cult rallies. And lately he has been obsessed with lies about the impeachment hearings hurting Democrats.

Fox News, Titanic

Contrary to Trump’s plaintive whining, polls show that it’s his own approval rating that has suffered throughout the impeachment hearings. A majority of Americans still favor his impeachment and removal from office. But that isn’t the only downside for Trump World. His state TV propaganda network, Fox News, is also being dragged down by the loathing he has cultivated for himself and his Republican Nationalist Party.

The numbers for the month of November tell a tale of woe for Trump’s media minions. Year to year, Fox News viewership for the total day in the all-important 25-54 year old demographic declined 11%. That compared to MSNBC’s rise of 5%. Fox’s daytime ratings in the demo declined 5% (MSNBC was up 19%). And Fox’s primetime schedule featuring Trump-fluffers Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, dropped 12% (MSNBC was up 8%).

MSNBC’s strong performance was once again driven by Rachel Maddow. Her program handily beat Hannity with an average audience of 572,000 a night. Hannity, Fox’s top rated program, trailed with only 554,000. But she wasn’t alone. Chris Hayes, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Brian Williams all notched highs for the year in their time periods. Williams ranked No. 1 in his timeslot among adults 25-54. On the dayside, Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace was the most-watched cable news show at 4:00pm for the third straight month.

This is the second straight month where MSNBC’s growth outpaced Fox News. And it’s the third straight month that Maddow has topped Hannity. During most of this time the news has been consumed by contentious issues like impeachment and the 2020 election. Fox News has juiced its programming with live, interrupted coverage of Trump’s rallies (19 so far this year). But even that Trumpioid-fix for addicted Trump cultists didn’t keep viewers from fleeing.

Democrats should learn from this that they need to keep up the pressure on Trump. It’s not only educating the public about his criminal activities, it’s having a positive impact on impeachment in the polls, and on ratings for programs that aren’t afraid to tell the truth about Trump. Democrats need to ignore Trump’s impotent wailing about “witch hunts” and lies about how adored he is. He isn’t. And the more we point that out, the lower he sinks into the abyss of his own lies.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Thinks He’s Still on Reality TV, Doesn’t Know Fox News is an Entertainment Network

Posted by on September 1, 2019 at 11:03 am. 2 Comments :

The fact that Donald Trump is suffering from a crushing array of delusional departures from the real world is unarguable. He regards himself as “The Chosen One.” He believes that only he can solve America’s problems (despite the fact that he’s failed to deliver on his campaign promises), In his warped mind he knows more than anyone on every subject. And these delusions are separate and apart from his ceaseless lies (more than 12,000 so far).

Donald Trump TV Set

However, there is a common thread that weaves through much of the hallucinatory fallacies that clutter his emotionally and intellectually stunted brain. He has an all-consuming fetish with his perceived popularity. Crowd size seems to be a stand-in for his virility. And often his craving for attention is manifested in his obsession with polls. But unfortunately for him, they mostly reflect how bitterly despised he is by most Americans. Even polls from Fox News and his favorite ultra-biased pollster, Rasmussen, show him in dire straits.

But polls are just the political equivalent of a mode of survey that Trump has had much more exposure to: The Nielsen Ratings. His fourteen years as the host of a reality TV game show has permeated his world view. And it is the prism through which he sees everything related to his life and presidency. This contorted mindset produced a Sunday morning tweet attacking sitcom star Debra Messing:

Here Trump is renewing his competition with other celebrities while also wholly inventing their alleged admiration for him. (I’d bet the limit at the Trump Taj Mahal that Messing never called him “sir”). He’s also demonstrating that he gauges his self-worth by his comparison – not to other presidents – but to other Hollywood luminaries. That’s his benchmark of approval. What’s more, he measures the value of news media by the same criteria. It isn’t insight or knowledge or experience that validates the media. It’s ratings. Which is why Trump also tweeted this tribute to his pal Sean Hannity:

First of all, Hannity is not the number one show on cable television. It’s the number one “news” show on cable television, which is a much smaller set of programs. Secondly, Trump isn’t the “favorite president” of anyone but his glassy-eyed cadre of Deplorables. But more importantly, there is no significance to the fact that the Fox News Trump-fluffers in primetime have higher ratings than the rest of the network’s programming. There’s a reason that time is called “prime.”

What Trump is doing here is trying to rescue himself from some painfully idiotic comments made last week admonishing Fox for failing to be 100% adoring. In a fit of hurt feelings he ordered his cult followers to “start looking for a new news network” because Fox “isn’t working for us anymore.” This was his way of reassuring Hannity that he still appreciates his up-sucking.

Trump’s intense focus on ratings is evidence that he has never left the realm of television ranking and marketing. Nothing matters to him except for how he is perceived by the standards of Hollywood. That explains why the only thing that was important to him about his visit to the hospital in El Paso where shooting victims were recovering was making sure that everyone knew how much he was loved. He wasn’t. In fact every patient refused to see him.

Trump’s single-minded concentration on ratings is matched by the market positioning of Fox News. They place a similar weight of stature on numbers, rather than quality or honesty. That’s because they have long considered themselves to be part of the entertainment sector of television, not news. Their late, disgraced CEO, Roger Ailes, even admitted it, dismissing his news competition to tell the Hollywood Reporter that “We’re competing with TNT and USA and ESPN.” And the product they put on the air proves that. Even the Fox News website promotes their programs as entertainment, rather than news. That particular promotion was for Tucker Carlson, who Fox thinks people should watch because he’s such an asshole.

Fox News has redefined television “journalism” by fundamentally transforming it from an information medium to an entertainment medium. They dress up their pseudo-news segments in the same reality TV, soap opera packaging that entertainment outlets use: conflict, scandal, mystery, and hyper-charged emotions including hero worship and fear. Fox employs flashy graphics and attention-grabbing audio whooshes and gongs to decorate their reports that are presented as ‘ALERTS’ regardless of the news value. And always there is sex. Fox’s roster of hosts has more former beauty pageant contestants that journalists.

So Fox News is the perfect chronicler of the bizarre presidency of Donald Trump. They are, in fact, recording the trials and tribulations of a fictional character, that they helped to invent, as he stumbles through his sappily scripted, melodramatic existence. And Trump embraces that rendering of his White House antics. It’s playacting on a world stage. The problem is that for the rest of the world’s inhabitants it’s all too real and frightening and dangerous. This show needs to be canceled ASAP if the we want to survive until next season.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

One more thing, just for fun: In October of 2009, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart covered this subject in a brilliant and hysterical segment entitled “FOR FOX SAKE! Fox News defends itself against an attack by the Obama administration by explaining that most of their shows aren’t real news.” ENJOY!

Rachel Maddow Leads MSNBC to a January Freeze-Out of Sean Hannity and State TV (aka Fox News)

Posted by on January 30, 2019 at 10:11 am. 6 Comments :

The new year has started off with big bang for MSNBC and its star anchor Rachel Maddow. For the past couple months her program has been smothering her Fox News competition, Sean Hannity. It began immediately after the midterm election on November 6th and hasn’t slowed down since. And January’s results confirm that it was no fluke. Maddow has definitely caught fire and her sharp analysis and engaging manner of unfolding complex subjects is clearly winning over viewers.

Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity

Some of the highlights from the January Nielsen ratings include that Maddow was the number one non-sports show on all of cable, not just just news programming. She dominated in both total audience and the advertiser friendly 25-54 demographic. Her success helped drive up the performance of her primetime colleagues Lawrence O’Donnell and Brian Williams. In fact, that bloc of programming won every hour for the entire month.

Maddow’s show contributed to MSNBC’s impressive audience growth. It gained fourteen percent in total day, and six percent in prime time versus January 2018. During the same time period Fox News declined significantly. It’s total day viewership was down eleven percent. In primetime Fox News lost ten percent. And those numbers were even worse for in the 25-54 demo: down twenty-one percent total day, and twenty percent in the demo.

Almost as satisfying as Maddow’s success is the failure of Fox’s Sean Hannity. Once the unchallenged cable news champ, Hannity’s total ratings crashed nineteen percent since the midterms in November. His fall in the demo was a massive thirty percent. His Fox News lead-in, Tucker Carlson, didn’t fare any better. He was Fox’s top program, but he trailed Maddow by seventeen percent in total audience, and by nineteen percent in the demo. It’s a relief to know that America’s television viewers are recognizing the hatred and racism that emanates from the likes of Carlson and Hannity and are changing the channel.

What’s more, Carlson and Laura Ingraham are suffering from an advertiser exodus due to their offensive positions. Carlson mainly for his open advocacy of white nationalism. And Ingraham for her attacks on the kids from Parkland, Florida, who survived the school shooting last year. So their shows are not only losing viewers, but they aren’t making any money either.

In addition to the solid wins by Maddow, there was good news in January’s numbers for the rest of the MSNBC roster. The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and The 11th Hour with Brian Williams were both number one in both total audience and the demo. Morning Joe rose fourteen percent while its competition, Fox and Friends, sunk ten percent. Hardball was number one in total viewers. And the programs hosted by Chris Hayes, Ari Melber, Stephanie Ruhle, Hallie Jackson, Craig Melvin, Andrea Mitchell, Ali Velshi, and Katy Tur all posted record numbers. One particular standout was Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace, which was number one in total viewers, beating perennial Fox News host Neil Cavuto.

The days of Fox News dominating the cable news ratings are definitely over. And thanks for that should go to Rachel Maddow for redefining how a successful news program can be produced. She does not follow the daily tweetstorming of the President, and never hosts panels of belligerent partisans yelling over each other. She presents detailed examinations of serious issues in an honest and accessible way, and respects her audience.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

But some thanks should also go to Donald Trump for behaving like a loathsome cretin whose flagrant lies are driving away whatever few rational thinkers are still left watching Fox News. Those who remain are the barrel-bottom crud who enjoy wallowing in ignorance and will never be pried loose from their cult worship.

Crybaby Trump’s Fear and Whining Loses to Pelosi and Schumer in Nielsen Ratings

Posted by on January 9, 2019 at 6:04 pm. NO Comments :

The most prominent character flaw of Donald Trump (among so many) is his dangerously malignant narcissism. He has an ego so large and fragile that its collapse could produce a tsunami big enough to wipeout much of the civilized world. The evidence of this is often revealed in his frequent bragging about things he undeservedly takes credit for, and his whining about failures for which he refuses to take any responsibility.

Donald Trump, Loser

Naturally, any poll that he can strain something positive out of, he will feature prominently on his Twitter feed. And among the surveys that he most likes to promote are those taken by Nielsen Media Research. Trump just gets giddy with excitement when he excels in the ratings. So the results of his Oval Office speech on Tuesday night are likely to bring a storm of rage due to his defeat at the hands of his Democratic foes, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

When Trump finds out that more people watched The Pelosi/Schumer Show than his pathetic babbling about steel barriers and beheadings, he may have a stroke. Sure, some Fox News viewers tuned out after he signed off. But the audience increased for the other cable networks enough to exceed the total for his audience. And the combined post-Trump total for MSNBC and CNN surpassed the number of viewers on Fox.

NETWORK TRUMP SCHUMER/PELOSI
FOX NEWS 8,221,000 7,864,000
MSNBC 4,025,000 4,461,000
CNN 3,390,000 3,742,000
TOTALS 15,636,000 16,067,000

If Trump was hoping to command a large audience of dimwits he could persuade with his oozing charm, he failed bigly. Not only did he give a presentation that induced narcolepsy, it lead to a Wednesday afternoon meeting with Democrats where Trump stormed out in a huff upon hearing that he still wasn’t gonna get the wall he wanted from Santa. Then he tweeted an insolent and incoherent message:

Trump seems to think that by agreeing to reopen the government, he’s entitled to total subservience from Democrats who still oppose the wall for a host of legitimate reasons. Those reasons don’t disappear because Trump finally behaves responsibly and Congress does the job they’re paid to do. And the wall isn’t his reward for releasing a hostage nation from his aspiring authoritarian grip.

There’s no way that Trump can win this argument because he’s relying only on an infantile insistence that everyone bow down to his demands. But Republicans in the Senate are already starting to fall away as they realize that deliberately hurting their constituents is bad politics. So it’s only a matter of time before Trump caves in with some face saving resolution that still denies him his precious wall.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Rachel Maddow Beats Her Fox News Competition Every Single Day for the Whole Month of December

Posted by on January 3, 2019 at 11:57 am. 2 Comments :

The new year is beginning with an incredible boost from the remarkable performance of Rachel Maddow’s program on MSNBC. She has been dominating her Fox New competition, Sean Hannity, ever since the midterm election in early November. But her numbers for December are truly spectacular and may indicate a monumental shift.

Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Fox News

The success of Maddow’s program may even be getting to Donald Trump. While he has never tweeted about her since becoming president, he did run an ad on Facebook that featured her as his top nemesis. Trump is notoriously frightened by strong women (see his fearful behavior around House Speaker Nancy Pelosi). And he has good reason to be scared of Maddow. Her program provides some of the most incisive, detailed accounts of Trump’s criminality and analyses of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. That attention to the facts in a comprehensible form has paid off for Maddow.

The Nielsen ratings for The Rachel Maddow Show have exceeded in almost every way possible. She beat the Sean Hannity show every single day for the entire month of December. Granted, he was on vacation for a small part of that time, but so was she. The numbers weren’t even close. Maddow topped Hannity by a whopping forty-seven percent in total viewers. She also whooped him by twenty-one percent in the all-important advertising demographic of 25-54 year olds.

What’s more, Maddow powered MSNBC to historic highs. The network was the third most-watched channel in primetime for all of cable TV, not just cable news. And it was the second most-watched basic cable network across the 24-hour day for 2018. It was the only network that posted double-digit growth over the prior year. And it was number one among African-American viewers for the year.

The rest of the MSNBC schedule also enjoyed record ratings. Lawrence O’Donnell, Brian Williams, and Nicole Wallace regularly beat their time-period competitors. And the dayside programs with Katy Tur, Andrea Mitchell, Ali Velshi, Stephanie Ruhle, Chris Hayes, etc., leaped to new highs. And all of this happened while Fox News either declined or made impotent gains of one or two percent.

This should inform the rest of the media that intelligent, honest, reporting and analysis is a winning programming strategy. The public is tired of deliberately hostile panels and ridiculous attempts to balance facts with lies and nonsense. And as the new year progresses with more revelations from Mueller and the expected oversight hearings in the new Congress, the media needs to rise to the occasion and fulfill its obligations to the people.

That means rejecting Trump’s anti-constitutional assaults on the free press that he frames in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people.” Maddow proves that when the press respects the principles of ethical journalism, rather than devolving into State TV flunkies (aka Fox News) the people will reward them them with their viewership, trust, and loyalty.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

WINNING? The Stormy Daniels Segment on 60 Minutes Outperformed Trump By Millions

Posted by on March 26, 2018 at 12:21 pm. NO Comments :

This could kill Donald Trump. Perhaps the most notorious personality flaw of the President (other than his pathological lying) is his malignant narcissism. His ego is so gigantic, and yet fragile, that he has to constantly convince himself that he is the smartest, handsomest, strongest, and bestest at anything and everything he ever attempts. He never stops bragging about what are mostly imaginary accomplishments that he portrays as breaking historical records.

Stormy Daniels Donald Trump

And particularly with regard to his TV performance, Trump falsely claims to have been the top rated personality for years on The Apprentice. So he’s going to take it very hard when he learns that he lost the television ratings war to a porn star. Stormy Daniels interview Sunday night on 60 Minutes delivered on the anticipation that preceded it. The first public comments by Daniels about her affair with Trump was compelling drama that included sex, violence, corruption, and even some humor.

But the part that will thrust Trump into another of his infantile tantrums is the fact that Daniels scored a much higher rating on the program than he did. The Nielsen overnights show that the Daniels interviewed was watched by by more than 23 million people and delivered a 16.3 rating/27 share. It was the highest rated episode of 60 Minutes in ten years. Which means, of course, that it beat Trump’s interview following the November 2016 election. That was also highly anticipated as it was the first interview of Trump as President-elect. But only 16.4 million people tuned in for that show. Stormy did more than fifty percent better.

You can bet that this is going to gnaw at our ego-driven Commander-in-Chief. After all, he is still obsessed with propping up his sore winner status over Hillary Clinton, who also beat him by millions of votes. And it’s only been a year and a half since that debacle. Trump just can’t get it out of his head.

This is a president who can’t talk about any subject with proclaiming himself the master of it. Whenever he addresses the tax reform bill that Congress passed, he says it was the biggest tax cut in history (it wasn’t). He says the stock market has risen more than during any other president’s first year (it hasn’t). He insists that he is the least racist person you will ever meet (so long as you’ve only ever met former Grand Wizards of the KKK).

Donald Trump is quite obviously suffering from a severe case of self-delusion. Virtually everything he takes credit for, he had nothing to do with. But he still demands recognition for having solved every problem he’s confronted. Never mind that he hasn’t repealed ObamaCare (despite repeatedly trying to sabotage it). He hasn’t ended terrorism (which he said would be so easy). And he can’t even get the Republican-controlled Congress to pay for his idiotic border wall (that Mexico was supposed to pay for). Reality notwithstanding, Trump exalts himself at every opportunity whether he deserves it or not. Here’s a tweet from September 2015 that proves how important this is to him:

The only way to characterize Trump so far in his presidency is as a loser. He can’t manage to keep people on his staff or attract competent administrators. His rallies are drawing smaller crowds with every event. And now he was beaten at the game he was so proud of for fourteen years by a woman who has never before been on television. He’s apparently afraid to even utter name. He will post insults on Twitter aimed at everyone from John McCain to Chuck Todd to Meryl Streep. But not a single word about Stormy Daniels. Perhaps he knows deep down that he is no competition for her. Or he knows what she knows about him.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Totally Nuts: Trump Says His State of the Union Ratings Were ‘The Highest Number in History’

Posted by on February 1, 2018 at 11:08 am. 2 Comments :

This is getting so far beyond ridiculous. The compulsion that Donald Trump has to lie about virtually anything cannot be regarded as merely self-interest or ignorance. This is a sickness. He lies about things that have no particular benefit to him; things that are easily fact-checked; things that are only designed to feed his gargantuan and diseased ego.

Donald Trump

The latest in a collection of literally thousands of lies came in the form of (surprise) a tweet about his State of the Union address. There was a curiously long absence by the President on Twitter (72 hours) prior to this posting. So it looked for a while like he had been kidnapped by the “deep state” or had his phone confiscated by the Secret Service. But on Thursday morning he reappeared to deliver this unadulterated bullshit:

Certainly Trump enjoyed all of the nice compliments and reviews he received from his usual pack of sycophants (Fox and Friends, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Breitbart). And just as surely he saw none of the objective analyses that reported his bland, ultra-partisan delivery and documented his lies. But Trump’s claim that the audience for his speech was “the highest number in history” was so completely deranged it’s hard to imagine that he’s allowed dress himself or use sharp utensils.

According to Nielsen, Trump’s audience wasn’t anywhere near the highest ever. His seventh place showing was an embarrassing loss to his perennial nemeses Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (twice each). No matter how hard he tries to rise above these objects of his loathing, he continually falls short. Here is Nielsen’s chart of ratings for historical State of the Union addresses:

Date Rating Viewers President
2/17/1993 44.3 66,900,000 Clinton
1/28/2003 38.8 62,061,000 G. W. Bush
1/27/1998 37.2 53,077,000 Clinton
2/24/2009* 32.5 52,373,000 Obama
1/29/2002 33.6 51,773,000 G.W. Bush
1/27/2010 29.8 48,009,595 Obama
2/28/2017* 28.7 47,741,000 Trump

Trump is correct that Fox News beat the other networks. But why that is notable escapes me. Trump’s glassy-eyed disciples are glued to Fox News and dependent on its Big Brotherly guidance. They wouldn’t watch the Trump Show anywhere else. And naturally, Trump’s reality TV fans are the most likely to tune into his lie-fest.

It should be noted that while Trump suffered this poor historical showing in the SOTU ratings race, Rachel Maddow was beating the pants off of Sean Hannity. Her MSNBC program was the number one cable news show for the month of January, 2018. She scored solid victories for three of the four weeks in both the key 25-54 year old demo and total viewers, and double-digit year-over-year gains. Meanwhile, Fox News declined by fourteen and eighteen percent, respectively, in those same metrics.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

That’s encouraging evidence that thoughtful, well-researched and reasoned discourse can prevail over rancorous conspiracy theorizing and hate speech. Not to mention that the toxic and tedious lies that Fox News and Donald Trump peddle are clearly wearing thin. And it’s only February. Hopefully this is an indicator of what’s to come.