…
Perhaps the audience doesn’t like being told how deplorable they are?
Good to see CNN and MSNBC getting what they deserve.
Fox News Makes Gains In 1Q Cable News Ratings While CNN, MSNBC Suffer Steep Declines
Fox News Channel was the only cable news network to make year-over-year ratings gains in the first quarter of 2022, finishing the quarter in first place and marking 81 consecutive quarters as the most-watched network in all of basic cable. FNC’s competitors, CNN and MSNBC, both suffered steep ratings declines compared to the same period one year ago.
In prime time, Fox News finished the quarter with an average total audience of 2.554 million viewers, up 3% from 2021, according to ratings data compiled by Nielsen. MSNBC finished the quarter in second place with an average total audience of 1.205 million viewers—down 46%, while CNN finished third with an average total audience of less than a million viewers: 857,000 viewers, down a staggering 56% from 2021.
Thank the Federal Reserve for mostly useless media. Easy money and big loans means the little media fish were swallowed by giant corporate conglomerates and then all the incentives change. Theoretically, Big owners of media outlets could afford to throw away money on them, while using their media influence to make even more money in all their other ventures. A bit like the way Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million and ran anti-Trump-news non-stop. He’s just protecting the main asset worth $1.7 Trillion.
Hands-up who wants to persuade the punters to vote for pagan weather gods, and inefficient, unreliable generators? How about burying lost laptops and high-risk health programs? It only took CNN 532 days to report that Hunter’s Laptop was real. Or maybe owning a media megaphone is just the thing to earn points with Klaus Schwab, who can return the favor some other way? Well, don’t buy adverts on a TV station; buy the station and put your adverts in their news instead.
The only problem is lies, propaganda and lectures are boring, and they can’t make us watch it (yet).
UPDATE: Why this matters in climate science (or any science) and in Australia too.
The Media was always a central pin in the problem in the science “debate”. Skeptics could win the observational evidence war (and have for twenty years) but no one knew it, and the media are the main reason that situation exists.
Australian climate policy is set more by the outcome of US elections than it is by Australian elections. We voted for No net Zero and got it anyway. If Trump had won, arguably, we wouldn’t have Net Zero targets now.
Australian politicians and journalists need to know how irrelevant outlets like CNN and MSNBC have become. Australian media management need to know how unpopular that messaging is. There is value in raising awareness to the decline of Woke Mainstream media. Even the ABC must be a little bit afraid of losing their audience, even though it won’t cost them money. It costs them influence. People become less afraid of “bad press”.
The role of this blog:
It’s been 18 months since the Hunter Biden Laptop, and US election irregularities were outrageously suppressed, even by formerly good Australian newspapers. At that point this blog became one of the rare spaces left simply for forwarding news on. Just a cog in a rapidly disappearing network. If the mainstream media here had been covering it, I wouldn’t.