As Matt Taibbi put it, Trump saved the cable news business. And now that cable is experience a downwards slump now that we are living in the post-Trump era, who will post as the next person to “feed the outrage machine”?
TK News reported findings via Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP), who are documenting the shift in a report titled, “TV’s Trump Bump Will Give Way To A Slump.”
As part of the report, they included a chart which depicts total audience of primetime cable news by weekday.
Yikes. https://t.co/dTwyOEI6ue pic.twitter.com/Zel6erjzrj
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) March 12, 2021
While it seems like a lot to unpack, TK News summarised it neatly, saying that the findings document a decline in ratings on TV stations including Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, specifically as the Trump administration prepared to move out and change over.
While the impeachment trial was wrapping up and eventually came to an end, VIP confirmed that audiences for CNN “plummeted” and MSNBC is also seeing approximately 50% of the decline that CNN is experiencing. Fox News is also experiencing similar drops too.
As per VIP’s article, they also predicted that “audiences would perk up for President Trump’s second impeachment trial“. And their prediction was proven true.
As per TK News, at this point it will be interesting to see how media executives will combat this slump in audience numbers. Taibbi also raises some excellent points himself. He said, “Six or seven years ago, it was common to see CNN or MSNBC fall outside the top 20 rated cable networks, below titans like Disney, USA, TBS, and the History Channel.”
Taibbi continues, “By 2020, the three top networks on cable – not just news networks, but overall – were Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.”
But most of all he wonders, “The fact that news ate away so much of the market share of the entertainment business in the Trump years raises questions about what exactly we were watching.”