What a year it’s been for CNN. Started 2021 on the top of the cable news ratings world. They were beating MSNBC and Fox News back in January of 2021. Then Biden took over, embarrassed the country and CNN embarrassed themselves. You had the various sexual harassment lawsuits against CNN hacks like Don Lemon, you had Jeffrey Toobin yanking and pulling on Zoom. All while kissing up to Biden, two CNN producers were outed in lawsuits as possible pedophiles. Now, not only is CNN at the bottom of the cable news ratings, they have fallen to 17th in all of cable, a complete and total embarrassment, even for CNN.
Oh, CNN thinks they salvaged themselves by luring away Faux News hack for CNN+, a streaming service you will actually have to pay for to watch. Who the hell is going to pay to watch CNN?
By the second quarter, it was clear viewers had grown disinterested and tuned cable news out. CNN was hit the hardest. While all networks suffered in the ratings, CNN dealt with a seismic shift: The network shed 53 percent of its primetime viewership from the previous quarter and 49 percent year-over-year.
Eventually, CNN fell out of the top five for all basic cable networks in primetime. In Q3 2021, its 822,000 average nightly viewership was only good for eighth place and showed an additional 10 percent loss from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, Fox News grew 9 percent in both total primetime and demo viewership from its second quarter.
CNN’s quarterly demo ratings sank to its smallest since 2014. The network experienced significant losses across the board, but most severely with viewers ages 55 and under.
And then CNN’s bottom fell out in the fall.
October saw the network only pull in an average daily audience of 487,000 and a paltry 661,000 in primetime. The demographic audiences only barely exceeded 100,000 and CNN again saw month-to-month regression in its viewership. The numbers weren’t much better in November, though there was slight demographic growth compared to October—a minor consolation.