MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and similarly-minded #Resistance television hosts may need to find another Trump administration story to obsess over if they want to stay competitive. Because the implosion of the Russian collusion conspiracy this weekend may have just killed the monster ratings these anchors have enjoyed for the last two years.

The Daily Beast reports [emphasis added]:

Within MSNBC, there’s an acknowledgement that the Trump-Russia narrative on which the cable network — and especially its primetime star Maddow — built monster ratings has fizzled for the moment.



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And it’s also possible that the Mueller disappointment drove loyal viewers away in much the same way that people avoid looking at their 401(k)s when the stock market is down. Maddow, who has consistently vied for the first or second top-rated cable news program, was sixth on Monday evening, down almost 500,000 total viewers from the previous Monday, as was MSNBC’s second top-rated program in primetime, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell.

To be fair, it’s important to remember these are extremely early figures. It’s only Wednesday. The collusion story went up in smoke Sunday.

It’d be foolish to draw definitive conclusions based only on these early ratings. We won’t really know just how hard the failure of the collusion narrative, which claimed the president conspired with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election, has hit newsrooms until we have longer-term data. All that said, this is still a huge dip in ratings in the days after the fact.

On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr announced that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could not “establish that the members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Barr also said the special investigation, which involved 40 agents executing 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, and 500 witness interviews, found not enough evidence “to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

By Wednesday, the Daily Beast was reporting massive declines in viewership for #Resistance anchors like Maddow, who was actually competitive in that hour with the ratings machine Sean Hannity, and at times even led him.

One theory for the sudden decline is that the Barr announcement has been so debilitating to #Resistance morale that the faithful don’t even want to know what happens next. A likelier theory is that Maddow’s viewers now think she’s full of you-know-what after being told for more than two years that Trump colluded with Russia and that Robert Mueller would bring it to light without any effort.

The collusion cash cow is most likely over for most major networks. It certainly sounds like MSNBC's brass are ready to move on to new things.

“[V]iewers can expect to hear less about Trump’s alleged collusion with Russians — which Barr has declared an investigative dead end — both from the cable outlet’s anchors and its paid contributors,” the Daily Beast reports, citing “network insiders.”

“This stuff ebbs and flows,” one source told them. “I think we’re ebbing.”

The Daily Beast's inside sources also said, “Time to pivot to 2020.”

Someone at the cable news network should probably tell that to Maddow, who shows no signs of letting up on the collusion issue.

“Can we expect President Trump and the Trump White House to finally accept the underlying factual record that Russia did, in fact, attack us?” Maddow asked this week in a winding monologue that included her going over more than a dozen additional questions for since-closed Mueller probe.

She added, “I know, I know, I’m just getting crazy. But the Barr report has given us this whirlwind of questions. The Mueller report, if and when we see it, should answer most of them. But tick-tock, how long do we have to wait?”