News and Commentary

CNN Ratings Collapse, Fox News Dominates Again

   DailyWire.com
A general view shows the stage during a walk-through before a Democratic presidential debate sponsored by CNN and Facebook at Wynn Las Vegas on October 13, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

CNN is now down to just over 500,000 average prime time viewers, while Fox News continues to dominate, new ratings figures released Wednesday show.

The liberal network, which presents itself as “facts first,” has routinely struggled with viewership. In April, the network’s much-hyped streaming service CNN+ was shuttered mere weeks after its start, due to its failure to bring in new viewers.

CNN is averaging 517,000 total viewers across its prime time programming, a report from Mediaite said.

Fox News, a right-leaning competitor, brought in nearly five times CNN’s numbers, averaging 2.57 million viewers across prime time.

Liberal MSNBC crushed CNN, too, more than doubling the network with an average of 1.18 million total prime time viewers.

“‘Anderson Cooper 360,’ which was guest hosted by John Berman, led CNN on Wednesday with 637,000 total viewers at 8 p.m.,” the Mediaite report outlined, noting that “Tucker Carlson led the time slot with 3.14 million total viewers, while Chris Hayes landed in second place with 1.21 million total viewers.”

Among the overall domination of Fox News is host Greg Gutfeld.

As reported in December, “Gutfeld!” — a rebrand of the “The Greg Gutfeld Show” — is about a year old, and still building. The success of the show has shocked elites in the media, begrudgingly earning Gutfeld “the king of late night” title. Fox’s “Gutfeld!” routinely beats out late night shows hosted by left-leaning Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Jimmy Fallon on NBC, and stomped Stephen Colbert’s ratings for the first time in August.

Fox News had already been handily outpacing its competitors in ratings. Forbes outlined Fox News’ ratings bloodbath for November.

“The Fox News Channel prevailed in the November cable news ratings, easily beating back the competition from CNN and MSNBC. According to ratings data compiled by Nielsen, Fox News delivered an average prime time audience of 2.578 million viewers in November, followed by MSNBC (1.091 million total viewers) and CNN (654,000 viewers),” the outlet reported. “In the key demo of adults 25-54 — the demographic most valued by advertisers – Fox finished first with an average audience of 420,000 viewers. CNN was second (148,000 viewers) and MSNBC (140,000 viewers).”

And a notable loser from the Fox News domination is newsman Chris Wallace, who jumped ship to join CNN+ just weeks before Warner Bros. Discovery announced that the subscription streaming service would be scrapped.

The shutdown left Wallace a “victim,” he claimed.

“It’s an interesting thing and I’ve been a victim of all of this in the last week,” Wallace said.

“The idea was you’ve got to get a foothold in the streaming world because that’s where the future of news off the mainstream networks is going to be,” the 74-year-old continued. “Now you have some equally smart people that have come in with a diametrically opposed view, these are the new bosses at CNN+ because of [the Warner Bros. Discovery merger] who have come to the conclusion that to have a narrow niche product like a news streaming service doesn’t work.”

“I have absolutely no idea which is right and wrong, but the Discovery people are in charge and so they made the decision,” he added.

Related: Warner Bros. Discovery Is Shutting Down CNN+ After New Streaming Service Struggled To Attract Viewers

 

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