It would be hard to imagine a news event better tailored to MSNBC’s Venn diagram of “lean forward” liberals and “place for politics” political junkies. Yet when Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ presumptive 2016 presidential nominee, held a news conference about her private email use last week — a media frenzy that functioned, albeit inadvertently, as the informal launch to her highly anticipated campaign — less than 13 percent of the total cable news audience was tuned to the network.

The low turnout wasn’t a fluke: Year-to-date, MSNBC’s daytime viewership is down 21 percent overall and 41 percent in the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic, putting it in fourth place behind Fox News, CNN and CNN’s sister network HLN. Its prime-time ratings are down 24 percent and 42 percent, respectively. In both daytime and prime time, MSNBC is bringing in its smallest share of the demo since 2005, the year before Keith Olbermann’s scorched-earth admonitions of the Bush administration ushered in the current era of Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton.


In a memo to staff in December, MSNBC President Phil Griffin conceded that the network is suffering: “It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for MSNBC,” he wrote. But change was coming, Griffin promised, with “more announcements in the New Year.”

The extent of that change could be vast: In the months ahead, MSNBC is likely to shake up the bulk of its programming, moving some shows and canceling others, high-level sources at NBCUniversal told POLITICO. With a few exceptions — notably “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Morning Joe” — every program is at risk of being moved or canceled, those sources said. “All In with Chris Hayes,” a ratings suck that currently occupies the 8 p.m. time slot, will almost certainly be replaced. Network execs are also considering moving some weekday shows, like “Politics Nation with Al Sharpton,” to weekends.

“The plan is to re-imagine what the channel is,” one high-level NBCUniversal insider with knowledge of the network’s plans said, “because the current lineup is a death wish.”

The changes, which Griffin has already set in motion with the cancellation of the little-watched daytime shows “Ronan Farrow” and “Reid Report,” are likely to be hastened by the arrival of new NBC News Group Chairman Andrew Lack, who will serve as Griffin’s boss.

Lack, a former NBC News president, is likely to rein in MSNBC’s ever-leftward drift and focus instead on creating more news-driven programming, with more involvement from NBC News talent. This could become a radical change of course for MSNBC, where partisan, opinion-based programming has come to dominate the vast majority of the network’s lineup in both daytime and prime time. Lack is likely to keep Griffin at MSNBC’s helm, network sources said, because his seven years as president make him best-suited to implement the changes.

Griffin and Lack declined to be interviewed for this article. Rachel Racusen, a former Obama administration spokeswoman who now serves as the network’s vice president of communications, denied that the network is considering plans to move or cancel Hayes and Sharpton: “Contrary to rumors that have already been reported on, there are no plans to move either Rev. Sharpton’s or Chris Hayes’ shows,” she told POLITICO.

For many media watchers, Griffin’s decision to pull the shows of Ronan Farrow and Joy Reid — both have become “correspondents,” in one form or another — seemed to reflect an acknowledgement that opinion-based programming wasn’t working in daytime. (Griffin replaced the shows with a two-hour segment of “MSNBC Live,” which is more news-focused and less overtly ideological.) By the same token, MSNBC’s defenders will often argue that the network’s woes are due to Americans’ waning interest in politics and liberals’ disenchantment with President Barack Obama. This argument usually ignores Fox News’ sustained success — it is and has long been the No. 1 cable news channel, through administrations Republican and Democratic.

In fact, MSNBC’s problems run deeper than the news-opinion divide, several industry insiders said. The network’s programming has grown stale, they say, while its principal rival, CNN, has been ascendant. 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, these critics say, and have become caricatures of themselves. The calculus for Griffin and Lack, then, is not just about balancing news and ideology. It’s about creating compelling programming.

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

The MSNBC of today is a radically different animal than the one Lack helped create as president of the news division in 1996. At the time, Lack and his colleagues envisioned the network as a smarter version of CNN, with straightforward news programming and analysis from across the political spectrum. MSNBC would effectively function as a 24-hour cable platform for NBC. In theory, the channel would give NBC News a huge leg up over its competitors, who were limited to their morning and evening broadcasts.

That all changed in 2006 with Olbermann’s diatribes against the Bush administration, Republican lawmakers and conservative media. Inspired by Olbermann’s success, the network began to rebrand itself as the liberal answer to Fox News — a savvy business calculation, given Roger Ailes’ success in turning that network into the right’s most influential media platform. Griffin became president in July 2008, when “hope and change” were sweeping the nation, and gave Rachel Maddow, Olbermann’s substitute host, her own show the next month. It soon became the highest-rated show on MSNBC.

Since then, and especially after Olbermann’s departure in 2011 (he had been suspended for political donations), Griffin began building the prime-time lineup around Maddow. Liberal opinion shows began to dominate more and more of the lineup, bleeding backward from prime time into the early evening and the afternoons. Maddow’s own influence within the network grew as well. In March 2013, her own disciple, liberal magazine writer Chris Hayes, was given a prime-time show at 8 p.m.

For some NBC insiders, the failure of “All In” — Hayes is a distant third place to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, both in total and in the demo — is indicative of the limits of Griffin’s reactive approach to programming. Unlike Ailes, Griffin didn’t set out to create a partisan network because he believed in the ideology. He did it because it made sense from a business perspective. Olbermann was popular, so he gave Maddow a show. Maddow was popular, so he gave Hayes a show. The problem is that not every disciple is as good as the mentor. Maddow was a groundbreaking liberal voice, an entertainer and the first openly gay prime-time news anchor. Hayes was just a smart kid from Brown University.

Hayes is now the most likely host to be moved from prime time, according to several NBCUniversal sources. Schultz and Sharpton, the network’s loudest trumpeters of liberal outrage, could also be relocated, possibly to weekends. Schultz, who was already moved to weekends once before, is seen as unpalatable, a Rush Limbaugh of the left. Sharpton is a walking conflict of interest for the network because of his role as a prominent civil rights activist. (Racusen, the MSNBC spokeswoman, said there were no plans to move either.)

Follow @politico

In the place of shows like “All In,” Griffin and Lack may consider experimenting with more nonideological programming, sources there said. “8 o’clock is a done deal. That’s going to change,” one high-level NBCUniversal source said. “There is going to be a change at 8 o’clock, and it’s not going to be a liberal. It’s going to be a nonideological, down-the-middle program.”

Maddow, the network’s marquee attraction, will continue to anchor at either 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., sources said. Chris Matthews, the NBC stalwart who has hosted “Hardball” since 1999, is also likely to stay. He is seen as an immense asset in presidential campaign seasons, and his program has seen impressive ratings gains since consolidating to one hour (it previously aired at both 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.). Several sources said Lawrence O’Donnell, who wraps up the prime-time schedule at 10, is also likely to ride out the current transition.

Dayside will go through its own changes. And in a strange twist of fate, the model show for the liberal network’s future may be the one hosted by a conservative.

Despite its own ratings setbacks, “Morning Joe,” the three-hour morning talk show anchored by former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, is among the network’s most influential — and lucrative — programs. MSNBC made around $300 million last year, sources with knowledge of the financials said, and while it’s impossible to know how much of that is attributable to “Morning Joe,” sources described the program as a “cash cow.” (Nearly half of MSNBC’s income comes from subscriber fees, and that percentage is set to go up significantly when MSNBC increases its rate this year.)

The success of “Morning Joe” depends more on the quality than the quantity of its viewers. The show typically draws a better-educated, wealthier and more influential audience than any other morning show on television. At its best — when the bookings are big and the conversation is focused — it has the power to set the daily agenda in politics, media and publishing. The problem, as many NBCUniversal sources rush to point out, is that, since 2012, the show has often lacked focus. However, one source close to the show said Scarborough has become “re-engaged” in the run-up to the 2016 presidential race. Spread across MSNBC daytime, the “Morning Joe” model would mean more shows that blend news, analysis and informal banter, anchored by prominent personalities and boosted by big political bookings. (POLITICO reporters and editors are frequent guests on “Morning Joe” and other MSNBC programs.)

However the programming lineup shakes out, the biggest challenge for MSNBC could be learning how to cope with an unrivaled Hillary Clinton candidacy. MSNBC rose to prominence on the coattails of a historic Democratic presidential candidate. But the current presumptive nominee has offered far less to be enthusiastic about.

“Hillary is not the ideal candidate for MSNBC to ride,” one television industry executive said. “A coronation without any real race is not good for them either.”

Indeed, after Clinton’s news conference about her private emails, the usually forgiving afternoon hosts at “The Cycle” hosted a very critical conversation about the former secretary of state’s poor handling of the so-called scandal. Gone was the enthusiasm of the “hope and change” era, gone was the promise of an uplifting campaign that could usher in a new era of progressivism.

Gone, too, were the viewers.

Follow @politico