by Walter W. Murray, reporter
It’s one of the most humiliating ratings defeats of all time.
CNN — once the most powerful name in cable news — has now sunk so low that it was defeated by The Hallmark Channel!
Maybe – just maybe – that would be a little understandable in December, when the channel linked to the greeting card company runs the nonstop Christmas movies that are a secret guilty pleasure for so many viewers.
But this didn’t happen during the yuletide season.
This happened just last month!
CNN’s nightly primetime ratings dropped so low the network fell out of the top 10 and all the way down to 13th place. And if something doesn’t change soon, some are speculating there could be a major shake-up in the network.
That’s a 27 percent drop in total primetime viewers from the same period last year. Adding insult to injury, the network also saw a freefall plunge of 23 percent in total daytime viewers as people flee its endless diet of Trump-bashing.
That’s a mighty fall for a network that was once the prime rival to Fox News, which led the way in primetime cable ratings.
The home of “Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” had nearly triple the viewers of CNN.
MSNBC – the TV home of leftist politics – finished in a distant second place.
ESPN came in third, followed by HGTV in fourth.
History, USA, Investigation Discovery, NBC Sports, TNT and Discovery rounded out the top 10.
CNN’s position in 13th place put it barely ahead of TLC and the Food Network, and just behind the Hallmark Channel’s steady roster of “Golden Girls” reruns and cheesy romance films.
The news only gets worse for CNN from there.
In the key demo that advertisers crave of adults between the ages of 25 and 54, CNN fell all the way to 19th place, behind even VH1, a channel you probably forget even existed.
Turn off the TV in airports and hospital waiting rooms, and who knows… CNN might sink to dead last!
The rapid loss of viewers might surprise some viewers.
But CNN’s viewers have been fleeing the network as if it’s on fire, with its overall ratings for 2017 plunging by a fifth.
It averaged just over 1 million primetime viewers per night for the year, down from 1.3 million in 2016.
The network can argue that the 2016 ratings were inflated by the election, but Fox News lost less than 1 percent of its audience from the election year, while MSNBC’s ratings actually grew.
For the entire 2017 year, CNN’s average put it in 13th place, not only well behind the top 3 of Fox News, ESPN and MSNBC… but also behind the surprising network that came in at 11th, just missing the top 10.
That network?
The Hallmark Channel.
Maybe CNN should just show reruns of “The Golden Girls” and romance movies instead of its endless fake news.
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— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”