On Monday, Vanity Fair media columnist Joe Pompeo wrote a piece that portended to look at the future of cable news.
“In terms of ratings,” Pompeo observed at one point, “CNN would argue that its falloff looked dramatic because the network gained so much audience during Trump, and that no one expected all of those people to stick around long term.”
CNN’s communications team should consider this a talking point.
Because it’s clear the post-Trump hangover is setting in.
Joe Concha, the media analyst for The Hill, tweeted the latest cable network ratings as of Friday, and CNN is outright dismal.
From the 4 p.m. hour through 11 p.m., CNN is getting slaughtered in each hour by its two main rivals, Fox News and MSNBC.
Just on Friday, among total viewers, CNN had one show pull in more than 800,000 viewers, Chris Cuomo’s “Prime Time,” with 881,000.
For comparison, the next lowest-rated show on either of the other two networks was MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” with Brian Williams, which pulled in 1.17 million voters, in literally the 11 p.m. slot.
At the other end of the spectrum, Fox’s Tucker Carlson posted the biggest audience, with almost 2.7 million viewers.
One problem affecting CNN is that it is competing with the same audience as MSNBC. CNN was just as biased against Trump as the progressive favorite MSNBC, but apparently, its on-air talent lacks the charisma.
Concha pointed how badly former President Donald Trump’s exit has hurt his cable tormentors.
“The drop CNN is experiencing is profound,” Concha tweeted.
“On Friday, not one program broke 900K total viewers. Prime (time) averaged less than 800K overall. For comparison, the network averaged 2.74 million viewers in January, so we’re talking about more than two-thirds of the audience – gone.”
The interesting thing is that Fox News, long the ratings kingpin, seems to have suffered least with Trump out of the picture. It benefitted from his presence when he was in office, and now is the only source of information critical about the Biden administration or the Democratic majority in Congress.
Is there any wonder why Fox’s competitors want it shut down?
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