Former President Donald Trump's absence from the White House has done a real number on left-wing cable news networks.
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The post-Trump ratings implosion has never been as glaring as it was this week, following the release of Nielsen Media Research’s year-over-year ratings for the month of October.
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The bad news for all cable news, including even Fox News, is that overall ratings are down across the board. However, if it makes Fox News feel any better, its decline in year-over-year viewership is nothing compared to the bloodletting experienced by CNN and MSNBC.
Fox News averaged 1.4 million total viewers in October, which is a 38% decline from this time last year. It also averaged in October 224,000 viewers in the all-important 25-54 demographic, which marks a 48% decline from October 2020.
MSNBC last month didn’t even crack an average of one million total viewers. It averaged only 680,000 — a decline of 54%. As for the 25-54 demographic, MSNBC averaged a measly 78,000, marking a decline of 68% from this time last year.
At CNN, things are far worse. It averaged only 487,000 total viewers last month, down 65% from October 2020. YouTubers operating out of their basements have better numbers than that. Talk show hosts, including Joe Rogan, whom CNN slandered this year, regularly pull in stronger numbers than this. In the 25-54 demographic, CNN logged an average last month of only 101,000, which marks a decline of a whopping 72%.
If you’re a CNN or MSNBC executive, you must be thinking of ways to turn these numbers around. True, at this time last year, there was a presidential election. There's bound to be a slump in the following year. But a slump of 54% and 65%?
It may be compounded by lousy programming, including disjointed moralizing monologues. CNN and MSNBC hosts and guests continue to obsess over a man who no longer rules from the White House. Perhaps it makes for bad TV to trot out Don Lemon and Chris Hayes every night to sermonize about racism and Trump’s extremism, or to divine from obscure online memes that the U.S. is a white nationalist country, or whatever.
Ratings have been down since January, as the coverage has had no choice but to move away from white-knuckled hyperventilating about the Trump White House to nightly sermons about racism, the Trump years, and what we, the viewer, can do to highlight the stories that really matter. Even the occasional attempt to find the next Trump, whether it be Fox News’s Tucker Carlson or some obscure congressional backbencher, has done nothing to resuscitate the left-wing networks' flailing ratings. Still, don't expect them change it up or try anything original.
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Tags: Beltway Confidential, Opinion, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC
Original Author: Becket Adams
Original Location: The left-wing cable ratings decline is real
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