". . .Of course, Morning Joe is hardly the only cable news show to suffer a steep decline from last year's election high. But over the past eight months, Morning Joe has been slipping not only in overall ratings, but also relative to its competition. Not long ago, Morning Joe—like MSNBC's prime-time lineup—was seemingly well poised to push past CNN into the No. 2 position in cable news (Fox News' Fox & Friends maintains the top position by a wide margin). To wit: In March of 2009, MSNBC executives announced that Morning Joe had topped CNN's American Morning in the demographic for the entire month—the first such victory for the network's morning programming in more than seven years. At the time, MSNBC press releases regularly referred to Morning Joe as "the fastest growing cable news morning show."

These days, it looks more like the fastest shrinking."