At the risk of sounding melodramatic, everything seems different since Donald Trump won the election. People who, before the election, would not have given him the time of day and even written him off are now making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago as fast as they can to meet with Trump. The general consensus must be to get on his good side now. But the most fun thing to watch has been the fact that Trump has literally broken the legacy media, and even more fun to watch is their realization of that. Now, the hard data is in, and it doesn’t look good for CNN. In fact, they may want to think about multitasking.
For the week of December 1 through 7, CNN had a smaller audience than The Food Network. During primetime programming hours, CNN came in at number 17, behind not only the Food Network but TNT, Freeform, Discovery, INSP, Hallmark Mystery, TLC, TBS, History, HGTV, USA, Paramount, Hallmark Channel, ESPN, Fox News, and even MSNBC. CNN’s primetime lineup consists of “Anderson Cooper 360,” “The Source with Kaitlin Collins,” and “CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip,” managed to get a whopping average of just 367,000 viewers in the 8-11 p.m. time slot. By comparison, Fox News averaged 2.5 million viewers for the same time slot.
Keep in mind this was by no means a slow news week. Stories included the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the ensuing manhunt, several of Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, the reaction to President Joe Biden pardoning his son Hunter after he repeatedly said he would not, and the toppling of the Assad regime by rebels in Syria.