MSNBC canceled Mehdi Hasan's weekly show today. Twitter is alive with accusations that this was done because Hasan is outspokenly progressive and pro-Palestinian. Or did it happen because of low ratings? You decide:
Hard to say, isn't it? Hasan's ratings over the past half year have been fairly steady, although he's lost a good chunk of audience since August. Most of this decline came after October 7 and may have been due to his pro-Palestinian stance.
So...... was he canceled because he was too pro-Palestinian? Or because he lost his audience because he was too pro-Palestinian? And does it matter?
You don't get "fired" for a minor 45 day shift in ratings on a moderately popular show. Those things change over time.
You do get "fired" -- still a commentator and we don't know if the pay changed -- for not following the boss's directions.
This.
Also, fully disagree with Kevin's premise that boils down to "fired because too pro-Palestinian."
Also, when I look at that chart... I don't see a "lost his audience" ratings decline. The October numbers are very mildly below the noisy but relatively stable periods from April to August.
It's also worth noting that it's basically in line with Anderson Cooper's ratings for the entire period, except for 2-3 spikes/troughs in Cooper's ratings. Notable that Cooper's have fallen further and he didn't get fired, but that's probably more to do with the fact that he's Anderson fucking Cooper than anything else.
I've always liked his show but his ratings suggest he was a space filler.
Anderson Cooper, though, has really catered. At one time I watched him, --but then there was a point where there was a complete alteration in tone and and manner so abrupt it seems like now he's being blackmailed to keep doing it and the whole point is 'blather, keep blathering, keep it moving, don't stop, blather, more blather, move on, forget that, move on, blather, more blather Anderson! Blather damn you! Keep moving! No one cares! Keep moving! Don't --omg! --Anderson, --what am I here for?! It doesn't matter, nothing matters, just keep it blathering!'
People still use the xitter. That’s even worse.
Well, when you have to take xit, of course you use the xitter.
+1
Who cares? Never heard of the guy. I am as almost as likely to turn on MSNBC as Faux “News” fwiw.
I know it's all the rage to call out MSNBC as a left wing propaganda site. Sure, it's commentator shows lean left. But they are basically grounded in facts. They believe in climate change - that's a fact, they believe Jan. 6 was an insurrection - it was. They have broadcast any and all court proceedings having to do with Trump's 91 charges - how terrible.
As for Hasan, he routinely goes right up to the line with his commentary. I am not surprised he crossed it since Oct. 7. No double advertisers got nervous.
"Both-siderism" has to extract their pound of flesh. No matter how crazy Fox gets, there has to be an equivalent on the left. Don't fight the narrative!
Btw, I do not equate the two at all.
No, but others do, which I think was the commenter's point?
As a Brit-by-birth, I recognize Hasan's presentational style and I love it. He's the heir to people like Paxman who wanted to make sure the audience were 110% confronted by the interview subject's failure to answer the question adequately.
It is a profound loss for Hasan to lose his spot doing this work, because nobody else. I don't really give much thought to his particular take on what is happening in Israel/Palestine, I just want news presenters/journalists who call BS when it is put in front of them.
Very unfortunate.
I agree. I appreciated Hassan’s point of view. It pisses me off he was fired.
I liked him just fine. But it's a bit of stretch to call the loss "profound" given that something like one out of nine hundred Americans regularly tuned in.
Yep, regarding MSNBC, you are right that "they are basically grounded in facts". Compared to Fox News, espeically when listening to their commentators, MSNBC looks really good.
Is this meant to be parody? I don't particularly care about Hasan's firing. But this looks like the kind of graph that Drum usually puts out to show that nothing significant happened. He will then point to how some other news source made it look like something happened by choosing a time like August as a point of comparison to create the impression that something happened.
But here he does the opposite. He points to a graph that seems to end largely where it began with some small noise in between picks the highest point of that noise and uses it as a point of comparison to create the impression that there has been a drop in ratings since October. Obviously a better case could be made that Cooper has lost his audience since October.
What is funny is not that someone looks at that graph and draws the conclusion he does. It is that Drum, who regularly mocks people who do that, is doing that with this particular graph.
Exactly -- Anderson Cooper's numbers dropped since October, not Hasan's. All the changes in Hasan's #s look like noise, well within the usual month-to-month variation he has.
Kevin may need to get checked for colorblindness.
Kevin didn't draw any conclusions. He asked a couple of questions phrased in such a way as to point the reader toward a conclusion, but that's not the same thing.
If you don't think that there was a significant drop in ratings that would justify Hasans's firing, then you could choose the alternative "he [was] canceled because he was too pro-Palestinian" which Kevin gave. Kevin did not claim that there was a significant drop in ratings.
Did you really read "So...... was he canceled because he was too pro-Palestinian? Or because he lost his audience because he was too pro-Palestinian? And does it matter?" and thought Drum might not be taking it as shown that he lost his audience? Wow. I wonder if Drum should be worried that his comment was unclear.
I really think the reason why Mehdi was cancelled was because Americans in general aren't used to the British style of confrontational journalism. Especially in the echo chambers, people are used to hearing friendly, congruent interviews of same-side folks.
Yes -- US interview techniques have fallen a long way since the days of Dan Rather and Murphy Brown. I don't have cable, but if I did, Hasan Minaj sounds like my kind of interviewer.
Beyond the ratings, how much was his show able to pull-in for a 30 second advertising spot, and were advertisers still willing to pay that? Or did he perhaps "Musk" himself?
A comparison of the ratings in the chart Kevin has provided with what one can see in https://ustvdb.com/shows/ is somewhat ... sobering. Yeah, that's what I'll go with.
Mark Levin doing way better on ratings?! Wow, I used to listen him for a few minutes now and then on his AM talk radio show before he went to Fox, and the guy was just a angry nut. An extremist, angry nut. He fit well on AM talk radio with its RW nonsense stations. It's just insane that Fox News gave him a job. Now he gets to spread his craziness more broadly. Honestly, I have never listened to him even once on Fox News. Just can't take the idea of doing so. On the crazy-propaganda-spouting meter, I wonder how he compares to Sean Hannity?
Didn't know about this, and sad to see it, though I haven't seen him for a while. In general I can think of two reasons why anchors might get jettisoned-- bad metrics, or they rub somebody important the wrong way. His metrics don't look like they've changed significantly, unless a) producers are having a hard time lining up people willing to be on the show with him (which doesn't strike me as completely impossible), or b) advertisers are pulling away from his show (which also wouldn't be impossible, but afaik ad revenue for cable networks is pretty much incidental) .
I'd put this together one way or another with their ditching Tiffany Cross about a year ago and guess it might be some combination of political stance and how these two come across. The bigwigs there seem most comfortable with designated jack-of-all-desks Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle (aren't they both ex-CNBC?) and willing to go as in-your-face as Joy Reid but no further.
They seem to be looking for a certain kind of complacency in the anchor chair, is honestly what it looks to me that most of them have in common. Plus, I always get at least a little annoyed at how the anchors all talk up being each others' best friends and worshipping the ground the other walks on. It makes me wonder just how professional the outfit really wants to be.
Hunch: nothing to do with ratings and a lot with something behind the curtains. Mehdi having the journalistic standards he has, I wouldn't be surprised if it was insubordination or refusal to be reined in. As for "pro-Palestinian", that's not the same thing as anti-war, at least it didn't use to be so..
Interesting direction-- maybe he wasn't willing to do the kind of podcast they wanted? So many of the other anchors are doing NBC-branded pods now and maybe he didn't want to?
Or, on reflection-- he's extraordinarily articulate and deeply prepared for everything, speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs without any hesitations or hedgings. Nobody else I can think of there can match that style. They're all (except often Ali Velshi, so maybe he needs to watch his back) casual conversational, with "likes" and "umms" and hesitations and repetitions (looking at you, Rachel) and other casual markers. Maybe the bigwigs just thought he was making everybody else look bad.
Are ratings the best metric to evaluate a host? Audience demographics is another important metric. However, the ultimate measure is advertisement dollars.
Just speculation but Mehdi Hasan would not be the first host to lose a show because of the feedback from advertisers.
What wingnut executives really want to see on their news channel is the propped up corpse of Louis Rukeyser inexpensively animated to appear to be talking.
Chris Cuomo has obviously taken some recent opportunity to go mental,
https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1730389281145774404
Because of his on-scene reporting, he's had to miss alot of shows in the last two months.
Surely that might have had an impact? He's still reporting for the network.