This interesting article says CNN is shrinking very fast. (Circling the plug hole kind of fast, IMHO). When your main commodity is trusted information and actual news, and you are repeatedly caught telling fibs, fabricating stories and embellishing for effect, and being blatantly partizan, well, folks just leave. You no longer have the product they want. We’re talking 1/3 gone year over year. That’s 3 years to zero…
They divide this into two groups, primetime viewers and “total day” so when you see “total day” immagine quotes around it…
Nolte: CNN Lost 35 Percent of Primetime Audience Last Week as Fox News Grew
[image left out:
Collage of CNN burning dumpster and Fox News Channel powerful primetime]
23 May 2018After years of misleading its audience with fake news, 35 percent of CNN’s primetime audience up and left when compared to this same week last year. These viewers might have gone over to Fox News, where the primetime audience jumped by +9 percent.
In total day, the news is only a little better for the far-left CNN, which lost -20 percent of its audience. Meanwhile, Fox News saw its total day audience jump by +1 percent.
While Fox News is growing, the openly left-wing MSNBC is also shrinking, but nowhere nearly as much as CNN.
Compared to last year, MSNBC only lost -8 percent of its primetime viewers and -3 percent of its total day viewers.
During primetime last week, Fox News was the number two network in all of cable, topped only by TNT, which is hosting the 2018 NBA Western Conference Finals.Fox grabbed an astonishing average of 2.4 million viewers.
CNN could not even hold a million total primetime viewers and bottomed out with an average of just 937,000.
So MSNBC is shrinking less, perhaps because it was already down near the bottom tier of “employees and blood relatives”…
I note that Fox Network was described as #2 “in all of cable” without the “news” qualifier… In an ever more finely fracturing entertainment market, Fox has a unique product.
So with only 900,000 viewers, how long can CNN support the huge fleet of remote reporters, trucks, satellite feeds, etc. needed to do the global coverage that made it famous?
For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area (including north bay, Oakland, down to Silicon Valley) is about 5 Million people. San Francisco City itself is 884,363 population as of 2017 per the wiki; so basically CNN can hold an audience about the size of one large hard core far left city, plus the South San Francisco city near it…
As they say “Oh Dear!”…
Since I’ve now “cut the cord” and am 100% internet media, I can’t even watch CNN if I wanted to try. They do have a web site though. But I’ve never explored it so don’t know what they have to offer…
Then again, so does Fox:
Comparative Alexa counts might be interesting…
They have a YouTube channel, so maybe that will “save” them…
https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN
Though with their top ranked “new story” showing all of 29k views, somehow I doubt it. Maybe we can all pitch in and buy them a cute kitten so they can make a Million hit YouTube Video ;-0
Fox News has a YouTube channel too:
https://www.youtube.com/user/FoxNewsChannel
Hmmm… 1.1 Million Subscribers… I think I’m seeing a pattern here…
Hannity’s latest clip alone has 55k views already and it’s only 16 hours old.
Musings from the Chiefio 
One thing that helps CNN, to this day, is that “Red” Ted, one of “Hanoi” Jane’s husbands, got CNN into all of the nation’s major airports when he started this venture up. That was a good decade ahead of Fox. They’ll coast on that a long time.
I wonder what % of their ratings are “captive” audiences at airports and bars who can’t change the channel…
CNNs numbers for April were just as bad. But the problem is not surprising. You do not need to tune to CNN to know what CNN is saying. They are a broken record (and the fact they get so much wrong does not help).
MSNBC got a boost from the snowflakes who melted over the election. There is no pretense of impartiality there. Fox does try to report news (contrary to the snowflakes allegations), so they continue to rule. You CAN get the news on Fox. All of it – the Trump good and the Trump bad. But you cannot get that on any other network (over on PJ Media they have a running clock that shows how long the news of the Democrat congressional advantage disappearing has NOT been reported on the networks or cable news channels).
CNN “tried” to pretend they were impartial. Donna Brazille killed that for the far left with her expose of Hillary cheating Bernie. And then CNN trying to hide that just affirmed to the rest of us they were never impartial.
As an aside, I was listening to ABC Radio news, where the talking head said that the “news” that the FBI spied on Trump was a “favorite Conspiracy theory” of conservatives. That was AFTER the NY Crimes, Washington Pest reported on it (yes, very conservative news papers there) AND Clapper confirmed it!
And they still cannot figure out why they are losing viewers/listeners. Forrest Gump said it best.
Re: captive Audiences at Airports – That is when the smart phone comes in handy. I do not watch the monitors. I read the news on my phone.
Clapper is also heading down the crapper …
“Clapper appeared on The View and pushed back against the assertion that he lied under oath about a NSA surveillance program that targeted law-abiding citizens, insisting that he “made a mistake.” He also noted that he never liked using the term “spying.””
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/laura-ingraham-i-trust-joy-behar-more-with-national-intelligence-at-this-point-than-james-clapper/
Great news!
Once my “work” day is done, some/most times I’m too tired to search thru all the available channels for something to watch while I eat dinner.
So I’ll switch between FOX and CNN during dinner.
They are both always about Trump….one resignedly, the other praying for any excuse for impeachment.
I generally watch the latter, cus my reading tends towards the former, but, ya gotta know your competition.
Re: captive audiences at airports
It’s been widely reported (maybe including here) that CNN pays airports, sports bars, fitness clubs and other outlets to run their channel exclusively. At the rate their viewership is declining, how long can that continue?
You can fool some of the people all of the time, CNN, but you can’t fool all of
the people all at the same time, a crashing circulation’s inevitable.
@uk (us):
I used to do that with a “loop” of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and a couple of others on the Satellite. Now I do it with the Roku but the players are different. RT, France24, Sky, Reuters, Al Jazeera, CBS, ABC… And occasionally NewsMax as the conservative voice. The domestic players are all essentially the same stories same spin 50% Trump and all negative / snide. Nice thing with the Roku is I can just hit “skip” and move to the next story…
@Lynn:
It will all depend on how much / head their advertisers will pay them… Once it’s not a net gain, the unravel goes fast…
@beththesurf:
Especially in news where veracity and reputation is everything. I can’t see their emblem without thinking Clinton News Network…
Haven’t watched a real TV broadcast in 10 or 12 years.
We get a small local paper and the WSJ. WSJ has a web site, too.
The Fox web site is free. Likewise Canada’s CBC, OZ’s ABC, and the BBC.
Many papers want us to buy a subscription. Others allow a few articles per month.
I realize that is not a full or well rounded selection but I only have a limited amount of time I want to spend reading news of any sort.
E.M, Clinton News Network… I always thought CNN stood for Contrived Non-News.
Not CNN but similar IMO
” wws
May 24, 2018 at 10:59 am
Scott Adams, of Dilbert Fame, made an incredibly funny comment on this:
Four things to understand about SPYGATE:
1) There was no spy in the Trump campaign.
2) The spying that did NOT happen was totally justified.
3) It would be bad for national security to identify the spy who doesn’t exist.
4) His name is Stefan.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/24/winning-trump-officials-discussed-whether-to-ignore-climate-data/#comment-2825403
Interesting link here
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2018/05/25/when-the-fbi-does-it-that-means-that-its-not-illegal-26/
h/t Another Ian.
That SDA link lead to some other good tech insight articles. I’ve posted a couple of comments on them starting here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2018/05/09/w-o-o-d-9-may-2018/#comment-95373