Tucker Carlson’s departure from FOX News and the resulting collapse of FOX’s ratings has completely scrambled the primetime television “infotainment” landscape. Until the departure of Tucker Carlson suddenly last month, 3 million viewers was an ordinary nightly audience for Fox.
The latest viewership reports have shown a surprising shift that has dealt networks other than FOX significant blows to their market share, with CNN being a clear – if unexpected – casualty.
The UK’s Daily Mail reports CNN suffered a humiliating ratings slump during Friday night's prime time spot as it was beaten by fledgling rival Newsmax for the first time.
Ross Ibbetson reported CNN was trounced by the conservative station in every slot from 8pm to 11pm. Star anchor Anderson Cooper mustered just 447,000 viewers for his flagship 360 show - 20,000 less than Eric Bolling, formerly of Fox News.
Cooper's new Friday night show at 9 pm, The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper, fell even wider of the mark with 293,000 tuning in. That compares to 325,000 who watched Chris Plante, an ex-Pentagon Correspondent for CNN, on Newsmax.
In the 10pm slot, Chris Wallace - the Democrat-voting former Fox host - managed just 263,000 viewers compared to Greg Kelly who secured an audience of 278,000.
CNN averaged 325,000 prime time viewers, while Newsmax netted an average of 357,000. The liberal news channel is now being thumped by a cable station which only started broadcasting in 2014. Meanwhile its old rival Fox hauled in an average of 1.44 million prime time viewers and MSNBC netted 1.08 million.
After 9 pm, no CNN show managed to breach the 300,000-viewer threshold.
(By way of comparison, CHQ reaches over 1.2 million readers if deployed to our full list.)
In what might be the most peculiar twist in the primetime TV ratings drama, the one recent bright spot for CNN was its town hall with former President Donald Trump.
The town hall initially gave CNN a rare primetime win, with 3.3 million viewers tuning in, firmly making it number one in ratings among the other cable news networks. But just two days later, primetime viewership cratered, putting CNN in fourth place behind NewsMax.
The trend continued through the cable news channel’s hourly programming, with NewsMax scoring higher total viewership for each hour than CNN, though CNN beat Newsmax in the demo for each timeslot. The widest hourly gap was at 9 p.m., when CNN’s “The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper” brought in 293,000 total viewers while NewsMax’s “Chris Plante The Right Squad,” drew in 325,000. Conversely, in the same 9 p.m. timeslot, CNN scored 85,000 viewers in the demo while NewsMax brought in 35,000 viewers in the demo.
Now, here’s the reason why CNN tanked after initially getting a huge bump from airing the Trump town hall – CNN’s Far Left progressive base viewers hate Trump and CNN’s woke employees hated the town hall, even though it boosted their network to a rare #1 ratings win.
Yahoo News reported, backlash to the town hall began even as it aired, as critics, with very few exceptions, bashed the idea of hosting an uncensored Donald Trump on the network. After it ended, several prominent media critics and journalists called on CEO Chris Licht to resign and there were multiple reports that there was backlash among CNN employees too.
Three hours after the town hall ended — after it was clear that the overwhelming response on the Left was harsh criticism — CNN released a statement insisting that town hall moderator Kaitlan Collins was “tough, fair and revealing,” and that the event exemplified the network’s “responsibility” to “hold the powerful to account.”
That naturally caused the Left to go nuts, including the woke CNN employees; Media reporter, Oliver Darcy published a scathing assessment 15 minutes after the network’s statement was sent out.
It was later reported that CNN CEO Chris Licht personally reprimanded Darcy for his criticism, going so far as to belittle it as “emotional.”
If accurately reported, CNN CEO Chris Lictht’s characterization of Oliver Darcy’s criticism of the company that fills his rice bowl was right on target. However, that could fairly be said of most of CNN’s reporting, it is all emotional and emotive reaction, not straight facts or deep intellectual analysis.
AmericanMilitaryNews.com reported CNN boss, Chris Licht, responded to the criticism after the network hosted Trump, saying, “You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them. While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America. The mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist just like you cannot ignore that President Trump exists.”
The woke political activists pretending to be journalists at CNN will never understand this, but our friends at NewsMax figured it out long before Chris Licht did, and simply giving Trump and his supporters – and the issues they care about – fair and balanced coverage has put them well-ahead of CNN in the ratings, and for that matter, probably made their jobs a whole lot more secure than the average woke CNN employee’s is under current circumstances.
If for some reason NewsMax TV is not available on your cable lineup go to https://www.newsmaxtv.com/ to find how to access it on TV in your geographic area or on your phone or other device.
Go Woke Go Broke
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CNN Trump town hall debate
2024 election
Fox ratings collapse
CNN ratings collapse
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Trump town hall backlash
moderator Kaitlan Collins
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