So far, 2019 has seemed like one of the worst years possible for major news outlets. Fox News is the obvious exception, but that’s because they’re the only major resource that has managed to steer clear of the top hoaxes that have plagued the news cycle so far. From the Covington kids scandal to Jussie Smollett, there’s been no shortage of false reporting, and we’re not even halfway through the year yet.
Of course, all of that pales in comparison to the media disaster that is the Mueller report. In the face of so many gaffes, have media outlets suffered any backlash? The answer is yes, and it’s so much more embarrassing than you think.
The Latest News Ratings
With April fully complete, we can see how our favorite (and not so favorite) news outlets did in the month. It’s a special month because April saw the full release of the Mueller report. Most of the mainstream media has been trying to spin the report as something that supports the relentless coverage they’ve spewed for the last two years. America isn’t having it.
CNN fared the worst. If you compare their 2018 numbers to 2019, there was a 26-percent drop in viewership. For the entire month of April, their average primetime viewership was only 767,000. That’s a remarkably low number, and we’ll put it in context to show how bad it really is.
MSNBC saw a 14-percent drop from April of last year. That brought their primetime average to 1.6 million viewers. That’s enough to stay in business, but it’s a far cry short of being a well-watched news channel.
Fox News, by comparison, saw no net change from the previous April. Their average viewership held steady at 2.4 million. For those counting, that’s more than CNN and MSNBC combined. What does this tell us? Americans are fed up with the collusion narrative, fake news, constant anti-Trump rhetoric and they’re ready to move on.
Let’s look at those CNN numbers again. Having fewer than 1 million viewers for top moments is probably worse than you realize. An easy way to get some perspective is to compare YouTube. They track a lot of data, and the one that’s going to really send this message home is this: the top 10,000 channels on YouTube all average 1 million views per video or better. There are 10,000 independent broadcasters that are all more watched than CNN.
Now, this might seem unfair. A YouTube video has forever to gain views, but a live broadcast can only collect viewers in the moment. Well, CNN has a YouTube page. If you look at their most watched videos, they have millions of viewers each. But, if you look more closely, you’ll find that CNN hasn’t breached 1 million views on a single video in well over a year. Their average viewership for April was just over 100,000. If you add YouTube viewership to the live broadcasts, CNN still averages fewer than 1 million views per segment.
Channels that post clips of conservative speaker Ben Shapiro correcting college kids performs better than CNN’s best. It’s that bad.
The news channel that prides themselves on being the top source of breaking news on the planet isn’t even in the top 1,000 by any credible metric. There are shows run out of people’s bedrooms gathering more views. It’s a complete embarrassment.
The Cost of Lies
This is possibly the most encouraging news we’ve seen this year. Mainstream media has been lying, spinning and manipulating without rest for too many years. Finally, they’re paying a price for their deception. It’s beyond refreshing to see that the bulk of Americans aren’t taken in by the propaganda pieces of these outlets.
CNN was once the most watched and trusted source of news on the planet. They took that influence and used it to try to manipulate politics and popular opinion. Now, they’re so far down the list that they really aren’t worth mentioning anymore.
The rest of the left-wing media is following suit. CNN might have seen the most precipitous drop, but left-wing media is suffering across the board. For eight years, they propped up a failure of a president in Obama. For two years after that, they promised us that President Trump was a traitor and a Russian asset. Now, the truth is out, and these news sources are cooked.
Let’s stop giving them more credit than they deserve. CNN is less valued by the American people than random clips of kids playing video games. They’re not a resource, so don’t let that small handful of holdouts prop them up as such. We’re going to let CNN die in the darkness it created for itself, and we’re probably not even going to notice when they go off the air. Sometimes, the world finds justice after all.
