NewsBusters Podcast: Is Liberal Cable News Going to Unravel in 2025?

Is CNN toast in 2025? Is MSNBC going to flounder? They’re nervous on the Left about the legacy media being replaced by podcasters and the like. But if the usual pattern holds, the leftist base of these networks will return once Trump is inaugurated. We can hope they’ll have a small audience in the long run if they’re sticking to leftist propaganda. 

There is no doubt that the trump haters inside and outside the media are sad that Donald Trump won, and that the Congress is Republican, so impeachment attempts can’t begin immediately. They have tried 1,000 times to end Trump’s political career, and he’s now won again.

AP media reporter David Bauder has a new article (with Linley Sanders) headlined “Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new AP-NORC poll show they’re tuning out.” The story begins:

NEW YORK (AP) — As a Democrat who immersed himself in political news during the presidential campaign, Ziad Aunallah has much in common with many Americans since the election. He’s tuned out.

“People are mentally exhausted,” said Aunallah, 45, of San Diego. “Everyone knows what is coming and we are just taking some time off.”

AP’s poll in early December, found that about 7 in 10 Democrats say they are stepping back from political news. Despite Trump’s victory, about 6 in 10 Republicans say they’ve felt the need to take some time off too, and the share for independents is similar.

After election night through December 13, the prime-time viewership of MSNBC was an average of 620,000, down 54% from the pre-election audience this year, the Nielsen company said. For the same time comparison, CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers was down 45%.

At Fox News Channel, a favorite news network for Trump fans, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers is up 13%, Nielsen said. Since the election, 72% of the people watching one of those three cable networks in the evening were watching Fox News, compared to 53% prior to election day.

The others should bounce back a bit: 

“I’ll be tuning back in once the clown show starts,” Aunallah said. “You have no choice. Whether or not you want to hear it, it’s happening. If you care about your country, you have no choice but to pay attention.”

…He’s not interested “in watching the angry man on the corner yelling at me anymore,” he said. “It’s kind of their own fault that I’m not watching,” he said. “I felt they spent all this time talking about the election. They made it so much of their focus that when the main event ends, why would people want to keep watching?”

At NewsBusters, we would prefer more straight news and less opinion. But at a cable news upstart like News Nation, which is trying harder than the rest to do the news straight, and they are not growing by leaps and bounds. But it’s totally natural to want to take some time off from politics for a couple of months after a very long presidential campaign. The networks know it, because there’s less politics in the news now. But that will change again in January.