Less than a year into new management’s ill-fated, sad makeover of the network in a vain attempt to recapture its prestige, CNN is doing worse than ever.
Via Forbes:
CNN had its lowest-rated week in more than seven years last week, as the network’s ratings struggles continue. For the week ending March 12, CNN had an average weekday audience of 409,000 viewers, the lowest total day (6 a.m. to 6 a.m. ET) ratings performance since the week of July 6, 2015. Fox News Channel won the week with 1.359 million viewers, followed by MSNBC (673,000 viewers).
It’s even worse for CNN’s “demo” — the prime consumer group that advertisers are most interested in reaching:
Among viewers 25-54… CNN’s total day ratings delivery was 81,000 viewers—which represents the lowest rated week in the key demo since 2014. Fox News won the week with an average audience of 172,000 viewers, and MSNBC was third overall with 71,000 viewers.
When the new CEO Chris Licht took over last May and proceeded to clean house, getting rid of human-potato-hybrid Brian Stelter and moving diverse prima donna Don Lemon out of primetime, the network executives imaged they might return to CNN’s 1992-era glory days — back when liberal corporate media still dominated the landscape, when it hadn’t yet squandered all public trust. The peasants were tranquil then. The effects of mass-scale offshoring — the “giant sucking sound” Ross Perot warned about — weren’t yet felt. The neoliberal, multinational corporate machine was running along smoothly.
Perot was laughed at then, dismissed as a kook. No one in the Rust Belt is laughing now.
In the intervening thirty years or so, the American people have slowly — only too slowly — figured out that they were had. Their government is not their government — rather, it’s now a cabal run by and for special interests at everyone else’s expense.
The ’90s are gone. I miss that decade like many people do, having grown up in it. But the era of general prosperity and innocence is gone, replaced by deepening cynicism and hopelessness. Unfortunately for CNN, there will be no going back.
Relatedly, Biden’s campaign pledge to “return to normal” was foolish, wishful thinking. Due to the disruption the political class caused with COVID-19 lockdowns alone, he may well have hoodwinked enough gullible voters with that line to clinch the nomination and then the presidency. But that kind of rhetoric has diminishing returns, just like CNN executives’ failed attempt to recapture the ’90s cable news magic. It won’t work for cable news gurus now, and it won’t work for Biden again in 2024. These people don’t know what world they are living in below their D.C. and Manhattan Ivory Towers.
The ethos that Licht pushed when he took over CNN in May of last year was to “focus more on news than opinion.” CNN had, by then, suffered terribly from Trump Derangement Syndrome for years, and as a result, its product had turned into whiny, insular neoliberal babble about the orange fascist. A certain segment of the population in the D.C. suburbs and perhaps Stanford faculty lapped it up — but not in nearly enough numbers to sustain CNN’s high production costs and bloated talent salaries while making a profit.
The problem is that the cat is out of the bag, Viewers know, thanks in large part to reporting from independent outlets like PJ Media, that when the corporate media pretends to have no bias, as CNN does now, they are really revealing the most pervasive bias of all: establishment bias.
“I’m not a liberal or a conservative. I’m an institutionalist,” proclaimed the self-important Brian Williams in his sign-off from MSNBC — apparently under the delusion that it is some sort of virtue when all of the institutions he serves are transparently rotten.
They’re all institutionalists; it’s all they can be. It’s their essence. They are, as a result, doomed to go down with the Titanic.
