While viewers are flocking to Fox News in the wake of Donald Trump’s election win last month, ratings for MSNBC and CNN have tumbled. The declines are far worse than what happened the last time Trump won, in 2016.
MSNBC averaged 603,000 prime-time viewers from the day after the election through Dec. 8, down by more than half from the network’s year-to-date average through the election, according to Nielsen data. CNN was down 46%, to 401,000 viewers. Meanwhile, Fox News was up 12%, averaging about 2.7 million viewers.
MSNBC and CNN both reported dips for the month following the 2016 election, but they weren’t nearly as steep. CNN’s drop was off a higher baseline.
Partisan viewers “turn away in disgust when it’s the other side having that postelection euphoria,” said Johanna Dunaway, a political science professor and research director of the Syracuse University Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship.
Dunaway said Democrats and Republicans grow disenchanted with the media and society when their candidates lose. After Biden won in 2020, Fox News’s prime-time viewership fell by 6%. Following Barack Obama’s 2012 win against Mitt Romney in the presidential election, Fox News’s prime-time viewership was down 13%.
A ratings rebound is possible once Trump is inaugurated, if steps he takes rile up liberal viewers enough to bring them back in front of their TVs.
Viewers will likely “start coming back when there is action,” said Christina Bellantoni, who runs the Media Center at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The cable landscape changed dramatically in the past eight years as Americans cut the cable-TV cord at an accelerated pace. Cable audiences as a whole have shrunk, but news channels remain very profitable for their parent companies.
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