MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow scored record viewership Tuesday night when she revealed President Trump’s decade old-tax records. More than 4 million people tuned in to watch, Maddow’s biggest audience in her show’s nine years. It was the third-ranked show across all of television at 9 p.m., beating ABC and Fox. Although the ratings were stellar, the response was not. Maddow’s approach has been categorized as a journalistic fail. She dragged out the revelation for more than 20 minutes to finally expose two pages of a single federal tax return from 2005, in which showed Trump paid a 25 percent tax rate totaling $38 million – nothing scandalous. “I think people are really concerned to see what’s in those tax returns,” she added. “And so, when we found out that we had one, it was like speaking to a group of people dying of thirst in the desert and we’re like, ‘Behold, we have found a drop.” The President’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, denounced the report as “despicable and reprehensible.” The non-scandalous tax records have now become a battle of authentic versus fake news. The word of the moment. Maddow obtained the records from David Cay Johnston, a former tax reporter for The New York times, who said the documents arrived in his mailbox (Johnston even contemplated on-air that Trump’s camp sent the documents himself). Good reviews or bad, scoop or no scoop, Maddow’s reveal is keeping her in the political conversation.