The main reason Hardball's ratings have fallen through the floor is the time slot switched forced upon Chris Matthews. He was a perfect fit at 7pm, because the only alternatives were the Fox Report (hard news) and Crossfire (now so utterly silly and inane that anyone interested in at least half-serious debate automatically switched to Hardball. But at 9, he's up against far more serious competition. H&C are directly competing with Matthews, and they're simply more popular. And Larry King, whose ratings aren't exactly bad on the worst of days, has his numbers shoot through the roof whenever he bags somebody good, like a near-death celeb (remember, TV news skews so old that the average viewer is in his/her mid-50s) or a big murder story. I know plenty of people that check out Larry first to see who he's having on, and then make their decision to stick with Larry or go to Matthews or H&C on any given night. To sum up, there is no other time slot, day or night, that's worse for Chris Matthews than 9pm. It also doesn't help that he's been shoved onto MSNBC full time instead of having dual runs on MSNBC and CNBC, because, let's face it, when your lead-in is getting a 0.1, you're going to get screwed over big time. Lead-ins are very important. Even today when everyone's got remote controls, there's still a strong tendency to turn on a channel and just leave it there for hours. IMHO, Chris should get his agent to demand a renegotiation of his contract to insure he gets a better time slot, or he should walk to CNN or Fox.
As for Nachman, he's not doing that bad. The only reason he even showed up on Drudge's ratings list is that on Friday nights only, the 7pm Nachman is rerun at 10pm, because for whatever reason Ashleigh Banfield in incapable of handing more than four shows a week. The Friday 10pm Nachman is almost never advertised, and of course itself suffers from the 8-9pm mindbogglingly low ratings for the other two shows. I've been told his 7pm show is much more competitive in its time slot, but it's almost impossile to get access to any ratings except for the 8-11 prime time slots unless you actually work at a network or something that pays Nielsen for the data. I'd give anything to be able to say all-day ratings for the cable news nets.