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.
