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NEW YORK (AP) – Rachel Maddow will not give up her cover of President Donald Trump or any connection with Russia's involvement in her bid to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. The question is how many fans her fans want listen.
Maddow's hearing has been receding for two days since Attorney General William Barr announced that special advocate Robert Mueller had found no collusion between Trump's and Russia's efforts. Its audience of 2.5 million on Monday was 19% below average this year, and it dropped to 2.3 million on Tuesday, Nielsen said.
Sean Hannity, his competitor against Fox News Channel, saw its audience soar on Monday to 4 million viewers, an increase of 32% from its average. It slipped to 3.57 million on Tuesday. One of Trump's biggest media fans, Hannity, was scheduled to interview the president on Wednesday.
Hannity and Maddow ran side-by-side in cable news ratings this year, with Maddow in slight advantage.
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox also saw their audiences rank above average these two days, while other prime time hosts on MSNBC and CNN saw their audiences fall.
The phenomenon is not unusual; political camps are more interested in the news when they reflect their favorites, and vice versa. Maddow's ratings fell sharply in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, as many Hillary Clinton fans could not bring themselves to watch the news after Trump's victory, so they finally bounced back. Likewise, Hannity has seen a slump in ratings at the end of last year, as bad news accumulated for Trump.
Maddow was the most visible TV personality in the role of Trump during Mueller's investigation, his methodical and detailed reporting. As a result, she is a target of Trump supporters seeking justification. The New York Post has compiled a model of "Madness Mueller" composed of Trump's critics with Maddow at the head of the cable channels, and the painting was retweeted Wednesday by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.
Maddow has devoted virtually all of Monday's show to what she calls the "Barr Report", which lists a series of questions she wants to ask. About half of Tuesday's show was devoted to the survey.
She did not engage her critics, but her fellow MSNBC personality, Joe Scarborough, confronted them in an edgy monologue on Wednesday.
He wondered aloud what the journalists were supposed to be doing for two years while many stories about Trump and their associates were misleading the Americans about contact with the Russians. He said he was not only dissatisfied with political criticism, but also with some media that "twisted" the volume of coverage.
He criticized anonymous people who "sold their souls to a cult of the personality".
And he promised that MSNBC would not give up the story.
"We will not look away," he said. "Damn the torpedoes. At full steam. Follow the story where she leads us. "
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