FAIL: CNN suffers in ratings after Trump town hall debacle
The venerable CNN, the network of Wolf Blitzer reporting by phone from an Iraqi hotel as “AAA” lit up the night, the network with James Earl Jones’s voice booming, “This is CNN,” every thirty minutes, has been reduced thirty years later to making decisions so reckless, so inexplicable, that the channel that once defined “cable news” finds itself trailing a new low-rent outfit that once criticized a White House dog for not looking “presidential.”
Last Friday evening, the once indomitable CNN lost a fierce ratings battle with Newsmax, as well as Fox News and MSNBC.
The old saying that numbers don’t lie was always wrong, but in this case, the numbers lay out a stark truth.
According to Nielsen, CNN averaged a meager 335,000 total viewers and 87,000 in the prized 25-54 advertising demographic during Friday night’s 8-11 p.m. time slot.
Meanwhile, Newsmax “red” the news to 357,000 viewers and 45,000 in the demo.
None of this happens in a vacuum, obviously. CNN has been shedding viewers like a retriever for years.
But last Friday came just two nights after CNN hosted Donald Trump in a town hall in New Hampshire, a disastrous event in which an audience of MAGAs laughed and applauded as Trump disparaged the same woman who had just successfully sued him for sexual assault and repeated his repertoire of lies while mowing over a hapless Kaitlan Collins.
The disaster isn’t confined to a single night. CNN‘s last quarter was its worst in recent years.
As if things need to be worse, the chronic ratings drop comes in response to a network change in leadership and ideology meant to address, well, a chronic rating drop.
Last May, CNN installed Chris Licht as the new CEO, and shortly thereafter, fired Brian Steltzer, all in a move that many perceived to be at the direction of major shareholder, billionaire John Malone.
As Vox reported last August, leadership wanted to “shed” any quality that could be interpreted as liberal-leaning:
“But complicating that narrative is the fact that Malone has repeatedly wished, in public, for CNN to remake itself. And his prescription happens to sync with the new CNN agenda: a plan to steer the channel away from what Malone and others call a liberal bias they say muddles opinion and news. And to shift it toward a supposedly centrist, just-the-facts bent,” Vox wrote.
Just the facts? And somehow Donald Trump spoke for over an hour, including, again, saying that he won in 2020.
Meanwhile, according to The Daily Beast, Newsmax received a bit of a bump when Fox News fired Tucker Carlson as part of a radical shakeup of the MAGA behemoth.
It is too early to tell if the damage CNN sustained last Wednesday night in hosting the town hall is an acute injury that will heal relatively quickly or a worsening of the chronic disease, one that will keep the network down for quarters to come.
One thing is established. Treating Trump like a normal candidate is akin to treating “Baghdad Bob” like a normal journalist.
CNN knows for a fact that normalizing Donald Trump and giving him fact-free airtime leads to an inevitable result — and not a good one.
Here it is, @cnn committing journalistic suicide:
If there was ONE consensus about 2024 it was that "covering" Trump the way they did in 2016 (handing him live
blocks of free airtime with no fact-checking possible) was irresponsibleAnd CNN's doing it pic.twitter.com/rZ6oFM7arS
— Keith Olbermann↙️ (@KeithOlbermann) May 1, 2023
"Trump is not actually running for a second term—he is running for a forever term," says @chrislhayes.
"The problem with giving that man a stage and an audience…is that that view—"I should rule"—is not a view that can be debated." pic.twitter.com/nJV9q3mqnh
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) May 12, 2023
I can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com, @JasonMiciak
