MSNBC Viewers Seem To Distrust Jen Psaki For Some Reason

Filed under: TRUTH & CONSEQUENCES

Former White House spokesunit Jen Psaki premiered in Rachel Maddow’s old 9 pm time slot at MSNBC last week. Viewership declined over the course of the week. According to AdWeek, Psaki’s show, “The Briefing,” had 1.074 million total viewers for MSNBC at 9 pm by Friday, with just 66,000 in the key 25-54 demographic prized by advertisers.

In 2025, the audience demands authenticity. Psaki does not come across as authentic. She is robotic, a talking-point dispenser with vocal fry. Psaki has acknowledged that she cannot do what Maddow does, but the producers are still trying to make her do what Maddow does. It is not a recipe for building audience trust.

“According to Nielsen data, The Briefing launched on Tuesday with a respectable 1.2 million total viewers and 139,000 in the critical 25–54 age demographic — the group most coveted by advertisers,” James Gordon writes at The Daily Mail. “But by Wednesday night, Psaki's audience cratered to just over one million viewers, and her key demo numbers plunged by 53 percent, down to a startling 65,000.”

Among younger viewers aged 18–49, the drop was even steeper - a brutal 67 percent collapse from Tuesday to Wednesday as her ratings fell off a cliff.

The Briefing was trounced not just by its competitors at Fox News and CNN, but by 38 other cable news programs across networks.

Psaki's show was outperformed in the demographic by reruns of 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' 'Bob's Burgers,' 'The King of Queens,' and even Nickelodeon's 'Paw Patrol.'

Rachel Maddow had returned to a five-day weekly schedule during Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, but went back to Mondays in the same time slot, leaving the other four weekday evenings to Psaki. Viewers are not liking the switch. “MSNBC’s primetime schedule finished third behind Fox News and CNN in the key demo,” TV Insider notes. Indeed, Megyn Kelly’s YouTube channel is outperforming MSNBC.

When she took over MSNBC in February, President Rebecca Kutler faced an impossible challenge. Cable is dying, so Comcast is getting out of the business. The network is being spun off as “SpinCo” and must hire their own news staff, since they can no longer free ride on NBC News for reporters or commentary. Maddow’s current contract is $25 million, a reduction from her previous contract ($30 million), but still hardly justified by one show per week.

“President Biden’s decline, and its cover-up by the people around him, is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Alex Thompson said in April. Thompson was accepting the Aldo Beckman award at the White House Correspondents Dinner for his aggressive reporting on Biden’s health. “But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves.”

We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better.

Along with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Thompson is co-author of the forthcoming book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which I intend to read and review. The subtitle, as well as the New York Times review, have drawn my interest.

For despite the many failures of journalism in my lifetime, few people are better-positioned to find out what was going on inside the Joe Biden White House than, well, a couple of career White House reporters. They don’t even have to be named Woodward and Bernstein. To Thompson’s point, it is still possible for me to rebuild trust in the work of Tapper and Thompson if they are able to honestly identify points of failure that they shared with other reporters.

By contrast, Jen Psaki has learned nothing, apologizes for nothing. Appearing on the Mixed Signals podcast with Ben Smith of Semafor on 2 May, the Friday before her first week hosting the old Maddow slot, Psaki denied all knowledge of Biden’s decline. “I never saw that person — not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day –— that was on that debate stage,” she said.

“I think ‘cover-up’ is such a loaded phrase, but I also left in May 2022 just for the facts here, and I have seen Biden once since then,” Psaki said, making some room to escape accountability. “People use that term as related to Watergate or the covering up of not sharing public information about a war… I think it's a bit of a dangerous term.” Dangerous for whom?

The 46-year-old said she hadn’t seen Biden in person during the time critics were questioning the president’s ability to lead the country.

“I’m not a doctor, aging happens quite quickly,” she said. “Were things that people saw during that period of time that were similar to that or would’ve been in a category of that? I don’t know, possibly and all these books are gonna tell us.”

What “these books” will tell us is that Biden’s cognitive decline took place over some period of years, and probably not just the two years and three months that passed between Psaki leaving the White House and Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump. “These books” will plumb the depth of the dishonesty around Biden’s deterioration and give us yardsticks by which to measure the potential dishonesty of Jennifer Rene Psaki, who acknowledges no error and insists on defending her own record. Her approach is clearly not rebuilding trust with the shattered MSNBC audience.