Government Shutdown: America May Be Losing, But Cable News is ‘Winning’

With 800,00 federal workers furloughed and many more working without receiving paychecks, the government shutdown of 2013 is about to roll into its second week. Republicans are finding it impossible to agree with each other, let alone with Democrats and President Obama, making it all the more likely that stalemate will continue on indefinitely and run up right against the coming debt ceiling deadline.

As the president himself said Friday, in an effort to distance himself from comments made by an anonymous administration official: “No one is winning.” Not so fast, Mr. President.

Looking back at ratings for the first four days of shutdown-mania (Monday–when the panic set in–through Thursday) cable news as a whole is definitely “winning” with ratings up big time across the board. From the moment all three major networks busted out their fancy shutdown countdown clocks, which quickly started counting up to mark the days, hours, minutes and seconds of the shutdown after midnight Monday, more and more viewers have been tuning in to see what’s happening and when it all might come to an end.

Here’s what all three networks’ countdown clocks looked like Monday night:

The biggest winner so far appears to be CNN, which was coming off of a tough third quarter, especially when it came to the primetime hours. The network was third in primetime over the last three months, in both the 25-54 demo and total viewers. While CNN still trailed MSNBC in total viewers this week, they made some serious gains in the all-important demo.

In primetime, Monday-Thursday, CNN average 301K viewers in the demo, beating MSNBC which had 293K. In all of third quarter, CNN averaged 179K in the demo in primetime, while MSNBC had 190K. That’s a 68% increase for CNN, and a solid 54% increase for MSNBC. In one CNN’s strongest showings, Anderson Cooper regularly brought in over 300K in the demo for his 8pm show last week, while that hour brought in an average of just 185K last quarter.

With an average of 416K viewers in the demo for primetime this past week, Fox News was far and away the ratings winner. But while Fox also saw an increase this week over its Q3 numbers (it averaged 279K in the demo for primetime last quarter), it was the smallest bump at 49%.

When it came to total viewers in primetime this past week, Fox News saw a modest increase of 36% over last quarter, going from 1.609M to 2.194M. CNN saw a somewhat larger increase of 57%, going from 542K to 853K. But it was MSNBC that really saw a dramatic change, bringing in over 1 million viewers each of the four nights for an average of 1.075M, a whopping 89% increase over their Q3 primetime total viewers average of 568K.

Rachel Maddow is the perennial primetime leader for MSNBC and her total viewer numbers this past week bore that out. She began the week at 1.125M and by Thursday reached 1.310M. That’s after coming in at 734K on average over the last three months.

There may have been other factors that drove cable news ratings up this week. The car chase on Capitol Hill that led to police shooting and killing 34-year-old Miriam Carey briefly dominated cable news coverage Thursday, and continued to be CNN’s top story Friday. But the shutdown and the ensuing blame game was the real top story of the week and all three cable networks figured out how to use it to their advantage.

The particularly impressive increase on MSNBC indicates that liberals were coming out in higher numbers than usual to see just how big of a hole conservatives would continue to dig for themselves as the shutdown dragged on. As the latest polls showing more Americans blame Republicans for the stalemate demonstrate, the whole unfortunate event is shining a bit more positively on the left than it is on the right. After weeks and months of bad news for President Obama on everything from the NSA to Syria, you can understand why more people may be returning to MSNBC.

On Monday night, Fox News will debut its new primetime lineup, with Megyn Kelly going head-to-head with Maddow at 9pm. With ratings king Bill O’Reilly as her lead-in, and plenty of speculation about her big debut, Kelly is in no danger of losing the match-up. But assuming the government stays shut down, she will likely have some tougher-than-usual competition.

[photos via screengrab, HuffPost]

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.