With 37 million young viewers each month, Cenk Uygur’s web-based “The Young Turks” network is succeeding where MSNBC failed

By: Joseph P. Williams, December 4, 2015

LOS ANGELES – He’s host of the most-watched political news program you’ve probably never heard of, especially if you’re middle-aged and watch cable television. An Ivy League-educated conservative-turned-liberal, he’s seized the attention of a coveted viewer demographic, beating out the nation’s largest cable networks – including his former employer.

Cenk Uygur says it’s all part of his grand plan: drive MSNBC and its cable competitors out of business, and teach them a lesson on authenticity in the process.

“We’re not stopping until we’re number-one on all platforms,” says Uygur, the force behind “The Young Turks,” an unabashedly liberal television program and 35-channel YouTube-based network. Uygur, the show’s creator and co-host, spoke to Whispers between tapings of his program during the inaugural Politicon gathering in Los Angeles in October.

The 45-year-old former lawyer and Wharton business school graduate spent 15 years parlaying a part-time radio program and “independent progressive” political commentary videos into a budding media empire that last year snagged, on average, an eyebrow-raising 37.4 million unique online viewers per month for his show alone. That’s tops on the Web; the CNN, Fox News and MSNBC online channels don’t even rank in the top five.

How are you going to appeal to progressives if so few of your programs are meant for progressives?

“We weren’t encumbered by some of the institutional problems that old media had,” Uygur said, noting that his former employer MSNBC – for years a self-styled lefty alternative to the Fox News juggernaut – is part of NBCUniversal, which is co-owned by corporate behemoths Comcast and General Electric.

Despite a lower profile than news talk shows like “The Five” on Fox News or MSNBC’s ”The Rachel Maddow Show,” Uygur’s 6 to 8 p.m. program, livestreamed on YouTube, has younger viewers on lockdown. Sixty-five percent of his audience is reportedly 35 or younger, a prized advertising demographic. The average age of Fox, MSNBC and CNN collective viewership is well over 50, according to Nielsen, a ratings research company.

Uygur’s style is take-no-prisoners political rants and freewheeling riffs on the day’s news with co-host Ana Kasparian. He says the secret to his success is authenticity. Cable networks “have no chance of competing against us because they’re fake,” he says, pointing out that MSNBC, in a ratings nosedive, junked its liberal identity and scrapped four afternoon talk shows geared to the left.

“They think, ‘Oh, my God, what will [Comcast or G.E.] think if we’re just truly progressive?’” Uygur quips. “So let’s put a Republican [“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough, a former congressman] on for three hours in the morning,” then make the midday programming “bland and neutral” before bringing on prime-time liberals like Maddow.

“What’s the point? How are you going to appeal to progressives if so few of your programs are meant for progressives?” says Uygur, whose network recentlyinked deals to broadcast on web-based platforms Hulu and Roku. “I know, I worked there. All they ever ask you to do is pull punches. But Fox News ain’t pulling no punches …They know exactly who their audience is.”

By contrast, who’s MSNBC’s audience?, Uygur asks rhetorically before offering up his analysis: “A guy who’s Republican in the morning, neutral in the afternoon and a progressive at night? It’s like, ‘The Riddle of the Sphinx.’ It ain’t going to work.”

Ultimately, his goal was “to be as authentic as we possibly could be, and it turns out that was what the market was thirsting for,” says Uygur. “We just backed into it. [But] in the end, facts and the truth do matter. The key is to be as honest as you can be, including about your own perspective.”

Late-Night Wars Get Political

After a highly successful run as a fake right-wing pundit, comedian and former host of “The Colbert Report” moved to CBS to host “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to great fanfare and high expectations. Three months into the run, Colbert appears to be winning the battle for liberal hearts and minds, but losing the late-night war to competitors Jimmy Fallon on NBC and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Colbert has nearly doubled previous host David Letterman’s youth demographic and is killing it online, according to media company Uproxx, but his real-time viewership lags behind Fallon and Kimmel, and skews to the left.The Hollywood Reporter’s survey of 1,000 late-night viewers aged 18-65 found that Colbert is a turn-off among conservatives, who don’t like his liberal bias or the fact that he’s booking political guests for more substantive interviews. “That’s not sitting well with many Republican viewers, who prefer Jimmy Fallon’s apolitical approach,” Uproxx writes.

Cord-Cutting On the Rise

The focus on online viewership is no coincidence. More young people are foregoing cable television for cheaper online video or streaming options, known in the industry as “cutting the cord.” According to a September survey of 2,400 consumers by Magid Advisors, a media consultancy firm, cord-cutting is increasing, it’s happening faster than the industry predicted and particularly among younger viewers. According to Magid, 3.7 percent of cable subscribers between ages 18 to 64 said they were “extremely likely” to cancel their cable service in the next 12 months, compared with 2.9 percent last year. That’s a 95 percent increase since 2011. The news for cable providers is even worse in the more focused 18-to-34 age bracket: 7.1 percent of them said they’re ditching cable TV within the next year.

Stat of the Week: Amount spent last year on U.S. broadcast-television advertising: $40 billion.

On U.S. Internet advertising: $49 billion (courtesy Harper’s Index).

An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Ana Kasparian’s name and also gave an incorrect age for Cenk Uygur. He is 45.