MSNBC's Phil Griffin has been soul-crushed by Megyn Kelly's blockbuster primetime debut for Fox News this week. Rather than deal rationally with the new reality, the beaten, broken man is now calling out Nielsen:
Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, says there's something fishy about Tuesday's ratings for the Fox News Channel, which were up significantly from a day earlier when Fox News debuted its new schedule. And he wants an investigation.
"...you guys should be doing some investigations; I have never seen it in all my years of cable -- same overnight, same everything. And they doubled their ratings in a day? It is impossible." Griffin continued, "I have never seen it. They did election-night numbers in the demo Tuesday."
The Nielsen numbers Griffin refers to include MSNBC beating Fox News on Monday in the adults 25-54 demographic at 7 p.m. and tying Fox News at 10 p.m.
At 9 p.m. on Monday, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show beat Fox News' new The Kelly File, hosted by Megyn Kelly, by a slim 10,000 viewers in the key demo.
By Tuesday, though, Fox News was back to its dominant self, with 573,000 in the key demo compared with 261,000 for MSNBC between the hours of 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Perhaps most dramatically, Kelly's narrow loss to Rachel Maddow from a night earlier was significantly reversed, with Kelly drawing an audience of 623,000 in the key demo compared with Maddow's 291,000.
Nielsen has not yet responded to Griffin's remarks.When the tranquilizers finally kick in and Griffin calms down, he might realize that FNC was likely more affected by Monday Night Football than MSNBC and, therefore, got a bigger bounce when those football fans returned to the network Tuesday night. Also, Megyn's debut on Monday was a smash hit by any standard and no doubt benefited from great word-of-mouth promotion the following day.
Also, sorry Kool-aid drinkers, Megyn Kelly has approximately 200% more charisma than Rachel Maddow. But hey, at least Rachel's job is secure...for now, anyway. Piers Morgan's job, on the other hand...not so much.
I think Piers is heading to the Falklands for his next stint at being whatever it was he was trying to be. But if I see him on Fox like I did Geraldo, I'm outta there. I'm so sick of watching William DeVane selling me Gold, and Fred Thompson wanting to reverse mortgage my house. Not that they have anything to do with the posted subject, but since I was letting steam go, I threw them in.
ReplyDeleteI hope Mr. Griffin, who is rightly worried about losing his job, wears the tin foil hat well, he deserves it.