Just three months after Mark Halperin made the splashy announcement that Meghan McCain would be joining his media startup to host a twice-weekly show, McCain revealed that she is “merging” that program with her other podcast and moving it to a new YouTube channel.
The rebrand comes as McCain’s Happy Hour podcast for Halperin’s 2way network has experienced soft viewership numbers since its February launch. The last broadcast of the show before the merger was announced, which featured an interview with Fox News media critic Joe Concha, has only managed a little over 4,300 views on YouTube.
Going forward, according to McCain’s announcement, the show – which had previously aired live at 5 p.m. ET on Mondays and Wednesdays – will now carry the name Citizen McCain, the podcast she first launched in 2023 and had been on hiatus throughout April. The program will continue to air live on YouTube twice a week, but move from late afternoon to noon ET, and the audio version will be broadcast on Apple and Spotify.
“Our podcast is going to be our live show on 2way like we have been doing – just now with our original Citizen McCain name because quite frankly all of you like it and the brand is already on our TikTok, socials, etc,” McCain wrote on Substack earlier this month.
“We will also be moving our time of recording to noon eastern on Mondays and Wednesdays so you can join live on YouTube, join our live zoom chat and ask questions, or just watch later on YouTube or download later on our podcast channels,” she added. “All you have to type in anywhere is ‘Citizen McCain’ to find our content.”
McCain added that she knew that “this journey with Citizen McCain has been a rocky one with different partnerships,” but that she and her co-host Miranda Wilkins are “very confident that our partnership with 2way.” She also stated that it has “been so fun doing a live taped show with video and believe this is the right path for us to merge the two things together,” insisting that “NOTHING about the content is changing.”
After the original Citizen McCain podcast went dark following its March 27 episode, McCain dropped a short announcement on the audio channels about the merger on May 1, letting listeners know that the show was returning in a new form.
“Meghan and Miranda have some big news! Thank you to everyone for patiently waiting out this limbo period because we’re happy to announce that Citizen McCain has officially partnered with 2WAY,” McCain noted. “This means that the podcast will be back, twice a week and if you want – you can watch the full show live on YouTube Mondays and Wednesdays at noon Eastern.”
During the first broadcast of the reboot on May 5, McCain declared that “Happy Hour is no more” before noting that both shows were combined “under one roof” at 2way. Since the rebrand, however, the response has continued to be tepid.
None of the full episodes of the new Citizen McCain has topped 5,000 views on YouTube. The show’s dedicated YouTube channel has only 2,650 subscribers as of Thursday afternoon.
Representatives for McCain and Halperin did not respond to requests for comment.
On top of that, since her show’s facelift and merger with the old podcast, which her Citizen Cain production company had previously produced, the new episodes and clips are only being posted and shared on the Citizen McCain channel and not 2way’s.
While the network’s YouTube channel includes a link to her channel along with a subscribe button, noting that it is “part of the 2way network,” the last time a segment or episode from McCain was posted to the main 2way channel was the April 30 live episode of Happy Hour with Concha.
Overall, the most views any McCain video has attracted during her 2way partnership appears to be for a two-minute clip from a February episode of Happy Hour, which featured the headline: Joe Biden’s Staff “All Hated Kamala Harris … She Was the Joy Reid of the White House.” That video has pulled in nearly 81,000 views in nearly three months.
In general, though, most of the full Happy Hour broadcasts averaged around 10,000 views, and outside of the Kamala Harris segment and a handful of others, the vast majority of the clips from these shows drew less than 5,000 views – with many failing to even top a thousand.
At the same time, 2way itself hasn’t lit the world on fire despite bringing McCain, journalist Michael Moynihan and others “to join its growing roster of ongoing bipartisan conversations curated by the veteran journalist Mark Halperin,” as Semafor reported in February.
According to social media analysis site Social Blade, 2way has been tallying about 83,000 views a day for its programming on YouTube, with the channel publishing an average of eight videos a day. The channel has a total of 78,400 subscribers as of Thursday afternoon, placing it in 2,428th place. Across 2,211 videos, it has pulled in a total of 22.8 million views.
McCain’s partnership with Halperin has raised some eyebrows, notably because she was extremely critical of the longtime political journalist after he was accused of sexually harassing and assaulting more than a dozen women in 2017, which led to him losing his plush gigs with MSNBC and Showtime.
Despite her past revulsion over some of the accusations against Halperin, which he has denied, McCain told The Independent back in February that she now sees things differently.
“With age comes wisdom and different perspectives on people. I am now a 40 year old mother of two. I have grown and evolved like everyone else, particularly in the past five years — Mark has also grown and evolved,” she said. “Like Mark, at this point in my life I believe in giving people the presumption of grace and forgiveness as I would like it in return. I have had the fortune and misfortune of having every single thing I’ve ever done since I was 22 well documented on the internet and thrown back in my face by people like you.”
Halperin, meanwhile, has “scraped his way back” to media acceptance and prominence since his #MeToo exile. Besides launching 2way and maintaining his political analyst role with the pro-Trump channel Newsmax, he has once again become a regular presence on mainstream cable news channels, including recent appearances on Fox News.
That also includes hosting a separate podcast on the new audio and video network launched by Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News star who was a key figure in Roger Ailes’ ouster amid sexual misconduct allegations.
