![]() ![]() She joined CNN from The Washington Post in 2017 and worked as a White House correspondent for most of the Trump presidency, doing the dirty work of shouting out inquiries at press gaggles and enduring the president’s bilious retorts. One of the stars forged in the crucible of peak cable news was Abby Phillip. I would feel very comfortable saying I don’t think we’ll ever see sustained full-year ratings like we’ve just seen.” “The volatility, the anger, the hatred that was spewed across cable news over the last few years, from both sides, clearly brought an audience. “It honestly feels like we’re back to the run-up to the 2016 election, like we’re going back in time five years to when cable news was really about old people,” he said. Rich Greenfield, a media analyst with LightShed Partners, echoed that sentiment. “In the meantime, the left-leaning networks will have to rely on politicians making the occasional gaffe and just get used to the post-Trump slump.” “The next opportunity for Trump to dominate the headlines will be if he declares as a candidate for the 2024 elections,” the Variety analysis concluded. Tucker Carlson held onto more of his viewers than anyone else, with a dip of just under 5 percent. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Rachel Maddow were each down 10 percent, give or take. The losses for Chris Hayes and Lawrence O’Donnell were in the neighborhood of 17 percent. Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper saw losses of a little more than 30 percent and Chris Cuomo a little less. It compared the total audience for each prime-time show for the first week of March versus the first week of December (a comparison network executives would argue is ridiculous, but that’s another story). The previous week, a chart created by Variety’s business intelligence service was circulating on Twitter. ![]() ![]() “Trump predicted news ratings would ‘tank if I’m not there.’ He wasn’t wrong,” declared a March 22 headline in The Washington Post, which reported drops at all three of the leading cable news channels (CNN the most and Fox News the least). It wasn’t long before dire prognostications began to swirl. Now they come home and decide what to stream.” (By the last week of March, Jones was spending an evening tweeting live video commentary of Zack Snyder’s Justice League.) Another industry veteran recalled a conversation he’d just had with a friend who said it used to be that “after work, they would come home and put on Rachel Maddow or put on CNN because they had to get caught up on whatever crazy thing had happened that day. There were, after all, plenty of other things to watch. But as the normalcy of the Biden administration sank in, the average person’s media diet began to feel further and further away from the nonstop tweets, the constant controversies, the soul-sucking turmoil.īit by bit, the Trump gold rush slowed to a trickle, and people began to break their cable news addictions. In the days and weeks after President Biden’s inauguration, without endless provocations from the man who occupied such a vast swath of our attention for the better part of five years, news consumption started to feel more and more, what’s the word-healthy? Liberated? Sane? It’s not as if there was suddenly a shortage of major news, not least of all a pandemic that continued to kill thousands of Americans every week. As the veteran producer put it, “You may never see those numbers again.” If this was peak cable news, you could call January 6, as dark and awful as it was, the peak of the peak. Simpson chase back in 1994.) But in cable news terms, the ratings were gangbusters. (Never mind the 95 million who watched the O.J. “This is who y’all remember: the dirty-ass 12.”Įven combined, those numbers pale in comparison to a megawatt special on one of the broadcast networks, like, say, Oprah interviewing Harry and Meghan, which netted a whopping 17.1 million American viewers. She was excoriating the dozen Republican senators, pictured onscreen in an MSNBC graphic, who were planning to oppose Biden’s certification. “You remember these bitches when it’s time to vote again,” Jones urged her followers in a 23-second video on January 4. And in the background of that was Jones, gushing over her favorite hosts, critiquing the commentariat’s remote-work scenery, and sometimes weighing in with impassioned diatribes of her own. In the background, there was cable news, narrating the minute-by-minute chaos, feeding our nonstop information addiction, keeping us hooked, lest we miss what happened next. Over the next three months, Trump’s “Stop the Steal” circus played out like a bad horror flick, complete with Rudy Giuliani ranting about imaginary widespread voter fraud while a substance that looked like brown hair dye oozed down his face. AS A VETERAN PRODUCER PUT IT, “YOU MAY NEVER SEE THOSE NUMBERS AGAIN.” IF THIS WAS PEAK CABLE NEWS, YOU COULD CALL JANUARY 6, AS DARK AND AWFUL AS IT WAS, THE PEAK OF THE PEAK. ![]()
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