The election of President Donald Trump has been very bad for CNN. The Horn News reported that CNN’s top rated show grabbed less average viewers than Fox News’ pre-morning show in April.
In May, the numbers have gotten far worse for the network Trump called “fake news” — and the data has network executives very unhappy.
In the first week of May in 2017, CNN averaged 1.12 million viewers per hour and 399,000 demo viewers during primetime.
May 2018 numbers just came in — and they’re a disaster. CNN averaged just 859,000 viewers hourly and 286,000 key demographic viewers.
That calculates out to a stunning 23 percent drop total hourly viewers and a 29 percent decline in key demographic viewers.
This isn’t from some collapse of cable news, either. Fox News has largely maintained their year-over-year viewership totals. Same with MSNBC and other competitors.
According to Breitbart, “By comparison, year-over-year in primetime, Fox News is up 5 percent in total viewers (2.24 million compared to 2.359 million) and experienced only a 1 percent drop in the demo (453K compared to 448K).”
That means CNN has gone from almost half of Fox News’ average viewership last year to just a third during primetime in May 2018.
The left-leaning news network’s daytime numbers didn’t fair any better. CNN saw their viewership during off-peak hours for both average and demo audiences drop 21 percent and 25 percent, respectively.
In the numbers critical television game, an extreme drop like this can very negatively impact advertising dollars — which means cuts to budget could be coming next.
That’s because this data isn’t just troublesome or worrying for the cable news giant. This is hair-on-fire-screaming bad news.
As more and more Americans turn off “fake news” CNN, it’s only a matter of time before executives wake-up and start firing their liberal hosts.
But will it be too late?
— The Horn editorial team