Who are the people who don’t watch MSNBC until the prison documentaries come on?
Political considerations aside, Fox executives mostly laugh at MSNBC and its dreams of cable news domination. In 2011, Fox News had profits of nearly $900 million on $1.6 billion of revenue, according to an analysis by SNL Kagan. The same year, MSNBC made $195 million on $420 million of revenue. And to catch Fox, MSNBC wouldn’t just have to sustain its current ratings; it’d have to double them.
[MSNBC president Phil] Griffin has plans, though. First, he’s cutting back on “Lockup,” the very profitable prison documentaries that run in marathons on weekends, because he felt they undercut the network’s brand identity. “He busted into prisonville,” Maddow says, admiringly. “Those shows rate spectacularly well. They make so much money. It’s like having an ATM in the lobby that you don’t need a card for. And to make the decision to give up some of that free money in order to expand the news footprint of MSNBC—had I been in Phil’s shoes, I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to do that.”
I can’t turn Lockup off fast enough. Also, too, those To Catch a Predator shows completely skeeve me out.
Who are they? The people who have no interest in any of the other MSNBC programming. The people who watch Honey Boo Boo and Gypsy Sisters. They watch the shows to see if they can see anybody they know.
I, for one, look forward to the Honey Boo Boo Prison reality shows.
It’s just a matter of time.
They are the people who are coming in first in the race to the bottom.
Yeah, they skeeve me out, too. I still of footage of some robbers executing their tied up victims engraved in my memory. They’re not just a movie–more like a snuff movie. Disgusting. At least with gladiators there’s some pageantry. To each his own…
did this really happen?
Has anyone unlocked the mystery of why they’re supposedly so profitable? Is it because they are so cheap to produce? That’s the only thing I can think of. It’s obvious to me that Maddow apparently does.
Sex and violence always sell well. Prisons promise both.
They paid that horrific Honey Boo Boo family only $40,000 for the rights to film them. You do the Math.
Watching MSNBC on weekends is observing miserable people who didn’t get away with doing miserable things. I watch MSNBC on the weekdays and see the GOP doing miserable things and getting away with it. The have’s and have not’s according to the GOP.
Well, if it’s true that the MSNBC president is cutting back on a very profitable prison show in order to do more news, then props to him. Hopefully it’s a well done news show (along the lines of Up with Chris Hayes or Melissa Harris-Perry). I do worry a little that they are chasing Fox, though. In order to get Fox-like numbers, you have to stop being a news channel and essentially do edutainment and scare shows all the time. We’ll see where MSNBC decides to go with that.
they moved Ed Shultz to the weekends
I always assumed the ratings were high because it was weekend watching in the real prisons. The ad buyers saw the huge viewership numbers and didn’t bother to notice that the guys locked up in cells could watch but not buy. I’m going to assume, haha, that it shares viewership with Limbaugh. Big viewership. Empty pockets. Well, empty after buying the Gold they advertise and protect it with their machine guns.
Its not just MSNBC though, is it? What did the history channel torn into? Pawn, even more Pawn, Hardcore Pawn, Dumpster diving, auctioning off lockers in order to Pawn, Space Aliens, and 2012 end of the world crap.