It’s been a tough year for liberal cable TV news. With Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race and his mental decline becoming more obvious, propping up the doomed candidacy of Kamala Harris, war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, and the election itself, they had an exhausting task trying to convince the American people that everything was great. But Americans were not buying what they were selling, and Donald Trump’s landslide election proved that. Now, the numbers are in, and Americans were right: left-wing cable TV news has been peddling a seriously defective product.
Some of the final Nielsen Media Research averages are in, and the Fox News Channel bulldozed their liberal counterparts, CNN and MSNBC, in the all-important 25-54 age group with advertisers. In total viewership, MSNBC came in second place, but in that viewer age group, CNN was in second place, even though earlier this month, they had fewer viewers than The Food Network. Both Fox and MSNBC increased their year-over-year ratings, and CNN gained ground in every area except total day viewership for that demographic.
The numbers for Fox News are pretty impressive. They had the biggest cable prime-time audience at 55 percent and the largest day viewership at 49 percent, their highest since 2015. As you might expect, the post-election period has not been kind to the likes of CNN and MSNBC. MSNBC managed just 16 percent of the prime-time cable news audience, and CNN just 11 percent.
But it was election night itself that was the biggest blow to left-wing cable TV news. Fox News garnered a staggering 13.6 million viewers, including 4.4 million in that coveted 25-54 age group. That made them the most watched anywhere on television. Part of the reason that Donald Trump won all seven swing states is that Fox News was the most watched in all of them. Independent voters were the target of both the Trump and Harris campaigns and a YouGov poll showed that the most watched channel among those voters was the Fox News Channel.
While it seemed like in 2021, after Trump left office, liberal cable news ratings dropped because they didn’t have Trump to kick around anymore, and that was what viewers tuned in for, in 2024, something else happened. This time, it’s Trump’s win that has brought declines for MSNBC and CNN. From election day through December 8, MSNBC drew an average of 603,000 prime-time viewers, down by more than 50 percent from their year-to-date average throughout the election. CNN had 401,000, down by 46 percent. Fox was up 12 percent at 2.7 million viewers.
There are a lot of numbers to crunch. But the bottom line is, is that “orange man bad” is no longer working for left-wing news media. They have been proven wrong too many times. They repeatedly told Americans that Donald Trump was Hitler, that he was going to put those who disagreed with him in camps. They insisted Trump would institute a national abortion ban. He has said over and over he would not. They said Joe Biden was sharp as a tack and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation. The list of things they have been woefully dishonest about goes on and on. Their problem: there are a myriad of alternative news sources, and more and more people go to those news sources and discover how dishonest they are.
MSNBC is facing a spin-off from its parent company, Comcast, and will not be connected to NBC News. Back in July, CNN chief Mark Thompson announced a massive restructuring that would include layoffs. Left-wing cable news may no longer be the only business where you can keep screwing up, and customers keep coming back for more.
