MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a largely unwatched showcase for a former congressman’s enormous ego, is (still) in serious ratings trouble, according to The Politico media reporter Dylan Byers:

HLN’s ‘Morning Express with Robin Meade’ has now bested MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ in the all-important 25-to-54 demo for a full year, with 116,000 in the demo vs. Morning Joe’s 78,000 in April. That’s an even wider gap than the daytime averages of 113,000 demo viewers in daytime vs. MSNBC’s 82,000.

Byers adds: “The continued ratings losses are likely to only hasten the programming changes I reported on last month.” Curiously, Byers’s report from last month features the claim that Morning Joe is not just safe from potential cancelation, but (according to his assuredly well-placed sources) is actually being held up as a model for all of MSNBC’s potential programming changes.

In today’s post, Byers continues to repeat the line of his sources, whoever they may be:

As several insiders told us at the time, the network’s programming has grown stale: Much of the younger talent consists of entertainers with no reportorial chops who can be hard to take seriously. Veteran hosts seem to have grown tired of trumpeting liberal outrage night after night and have become caricatures of themselves.

“MSNBC got boring,” one former NBCUniversal executive told us. “You’ll hear a lot of people talking about it being too far left, too political — all that matters is that it’s entertaining.”

So MSNBC’s ratings, we’re told, are in the toilet because its hosts are either too young or too liberal. It seems hard to square these explanations of MSNBC’s woes with the fact — a fact reported directly above these explanations — that among the channel’s worst-performing shows is Morning Joe, hosted by a non-liberal broadcast veteran. Byers does not even attempt to try.

But if insiders think MSNBC’s programming is “stale” and “too political,” they may want to focus their attention on the channel’s eight-year-old, politics-focused, poorly performing morning show.

[Previously: “Why Isn’t Morning Joe In Trouble For Its Terrible Ratings?”]

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