Here’s a good start : STOP LYING!
MSNBC played a deft round of Hide the Weenie the day before 2014 cable news ratings came out, when it leaked to the LA Times a memo from its president Phil Griffin to staff, in which he navel lint gazed about how “technology is continuing to drive unprecedented changes across the media landscape.” In the memo, Griffin said the cable news nets need to “be taking a hard, honest look at how we need to evolve along with it” — as though technology was the biggest of MSNBC’s problems and the reason it’s winding up the year behind Fox News Channel and CNN.
In a masterful bit of understatement, the LAT noted the release of the memo was an “attempt to get ahead of the bad ratings news” and acknowledged that Griffin did not reveal any specific plans to alter MSNBC’s lineup of left-leaning political talk-show hosts, except a vague promise to “invest more in programming and news coverage beyond the Beltway.”
CNN made a similar play last week, when it leaked a memo from chief Jeff Zucker,
in which he boasted CNN U.S. had a “terrific year,” though one that was
not without its challenges. The network, Zucker said, was ending 2014
in its best shape in many years, journalistically, competitively — and
financially, which might be owing in part to its end-of-year campaign to
cut roughly 8% of its staff – about 300 jobs — as part of parent Time Warner’s strategy to boost stock price.But CNN will close out 2014 with some all-time ratings lows. In primetime, the network has delivered its worst-rated year in total viewers and its second-lowest in the news demo. In total day, CNN clocked its worst-rated year in the news demo. On the bright side, it will wrap 2014 ahead of MSNBC in the news demo; through December 22, MSNBC lost 17% of its primetime news demo viewers, clocking a worst-since-2005 169,000 of them. To put this in perspective, this is roughly the size crowd as that of the Porcupine Caribou Herd in Alaska, Yukon and Northwest Territories, according to a recent photo census (which, unlike MSNBC, represents an increase in number — the largest population for the Porcupine Caribou Herd since the early 1990s).
CNN’s primetime news demo crowd — while bigger than that caribou herd, at 181,000 viewers — represents a 1% slide. Fox News Channel, meanwhile, is way out front with 302,000 primetime news demo viewers and, like the Porcupine Caribou Herd population, FNC’s population grew — by 3%.
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