To the surprise of absolutely nobody, CNN’s audience is in absolute freefall. Last Friday, their primetime averaged less than 800 thousand viewers in total, not a single program for the entire day managed to go over a 900 thousand threshold.
Joe Concha, the media columnist tweeted: “The drop CNN is experiencing is profound. On Friday, not one program broke 900k total viewers. Prime averaged less than 800k overall.” Then he added, “For comparison the network averaged 2.74 million viewers in January, so we’re talking about more than two thirds of the audience – gone.”
CNN hemorrhaged viewers in the month of April, but they were still able to average just over 1 million viewers, they were coming in third in number of rankings, compared to the other networks such as Fox as number one, followed by MSNBC. Fox News regained its top position, averaging 2.24 million viewers in primetime, despite being down almost 40% from a year earlier, MSNBC had 1.58 million views, down 22%, and CNN was not too long ago at 1.03 million, which was still 47% down from last year.
In the 25- to 54-year-old demographic, Fox News was still at the top at 368,000 views, despite being down by 45% from last year, compared to 278,000 for CNN, which is down 52% from last year, and 227,000 for MSNBC, a drop of 32% from last year.
CNN tried to trick their viewers into believing their ratings were actually up, but they were called out by Fox News. The liberal news network ran a three-month-old story which touted the network’s brief post-election ratings spike.
Fox News added the following:
CNN has been hemorrhaging viewers since President Biden took office, with ratings down more than 50 percent in multiple categories since Inauguration Day – but anyone who relies on CNN’s media team would be clueless about the staggering drop.
CNN’s media page, which is constantly updated, featured a story from Jan. 16 by in-house media pundit Brian Stelter boasting the network’s ratings were “soaring” amid a realignment in TV news. The three-month old story occupied key real estate on CNN’s media page, even getting a photograph to accompany the story placed next to recently updated top stories.
The story was originally published on January, but then republished months later when those same ratings had taken a huge nosedive.
Brian Stelter, the writer of the three-month-old story, has been one of the hardest hit CNN hosts by the drop in ratings. According to another Fox News story, Stelter’s “Reliable Sources” show drew the smallest audience of 2021.
They wrote:
Stelter’s show averaged a dismal 143,000 viewers among the key demo of adults age 25-54 on May 9, its smallest audience of the year in the category. The beleaguered “Reliable Sources” managed to pull in 829,000 total viewers, which is its second-lowest turnout of the year but up slightly from 810,000 total viewers that tuned in for the show’s smallest audience of the year on May 2.
By comparison, Fox News’ program “Media Buzz,” which runs during Stelter’s timeslot, they averaged 1.3 million total viewers, which is a 50% increase over the viewership of Stelter.
Regardless of Fox News retaining their position, all of the trends point to a move away from the traditional cable news, and towards a more decentralized information age, where millions of people will get their news from more and more independent sources and perhaps a combination with traditional news sources. It seems like a welcome change where the population will not have to rely on a monopoly of information networks, let’s hope the change continues.
