TV Ratings: MSNBC Falls Below HLN in May, Rachel Maddow Hits Lows

◼ Fox News Channel maintains a handsome lead in primetime and total day, while primetime runner-up CNN continues a healthy climb from the lows of 2012. - Michael O'Connell/The Hollywood Reporter

◼ EARLIER: Busty squad of fake Rachel Maddow fans promotes her show with identical spam tweets; Update: Accounts suspended

◼ A search yields hundreds of identical tweets like this: - Twitchy

Confession: I yell at my TV while watching Rachel #Maddow talk about filibuster reform in the same way most people do during football.—
Kassie Scattergood (@its_kassie5838) March 02, 2013

Confession: I yell at my TV while watching Rachel #Maddow talk about filibuster reform in the same way most people do during football.—
Tran Manhardt (@therealtranmanh) March 01, 2013

The tweets from cleavage-flaunting Maddow “fans” date back to at least Feb. 23. Using the DoesFollow service, Twitchy checked dozens of the accounts to determine whether any actually follow Rachel Maddow on Twitter. The answer? NO.

◼ Month of Breaking News Lifts CNN and Fox, but Sinks MSNBC - NYT

◼ Death of a Naked Liberal - Sultan Knish

...Newsweek's desperate covers last year amounted to a formerly respected magazine descending into outright trolling. It was no longer possible to tell the difference between Newsweek covers and Newsweek parody covers.

...The dirty little secret of liberal media is that it doesn't work. Outlets that identify explicitly as liberal usually play to a very marginal audience. Mother Jones begs money from its readers in the same obnoxious way as PBS. NPR relies on donors. The New Republic is flailing. Liberal mags that succeed do it by focusing on a topic that overlaps with a liberal target audience and embeds their articles there.

It works for magazines like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker. Online sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed succeed by filling themselves with so much trash that the politics becomes a sideline. The liberal brand is fine when it's stuffed into culture, elitist or trashy. It doesn't however stand on its own two feet. It can't, because it has no real appeal.

Liberalism remains marginal. Gallup polls invariably show forty percent of Americans describing themselves as conservative and twenty percent or less identifying as liberal. Liberals dumped the liberal brand after conservatives effectively destroyed it back in the Reagan era. They emphasize policies and rhetoric over political identification because a liberal political identity is toxic.

The cultural dominance of the left did not come about because a majority of Americans knowingly identify with it, but because the left has succeeded in breaking up its agendas into tinier and tinier pieces and making them part of the national dialogue using seemingly agnostic media channels. These stealth tactics have been successful because they eschewed open identification. Liberal media doesn't work when it's transparently liberal. That's why even liberals mock NPR's news coverage.

Liberal media influence works when it isn't identified as such. And when it is identified as such then eighty percent of the country switches the channel and cancels its subscription....

What media liberals fear most isn't the right, it's being exposed as the left. It's not so much what FOX News says, as its very existence that is threatening, because once viewers become aware that FOX represents the right, then, even if they don't agree with it, they have to come around to the conclusion that there is another side and that the media embodies that other side.

Liberalism is marginal, as is MSNBC's audience. Media outlets like Newsweek and MSNBC that go full liberal die. And that lesson has terrible implications for liberal power as a whole.