© Chayne Gateley/VIP
His White House tenure may be over, but Donald Trump is sorely missed by cable news networks.
VIP has previously covered the initial ratings
decline Fox News, MSNBC and, most of all, CNN, saw in President Biden's first week, as the nonstop controversies of the previous administration slowed down.
Our prediction that audiences would
perk up for President Trump's second impeachment trial proved correct. But in the weeks after the trial ended, audiences for CNN have plummeted; MSNBC is seeing about half CNN's drop, while Fox News is down single digits.
While the left-leaning networks may be losing steam without the ability to feed off of Trump being in office, conservative audiences have found new focal points for their concerns.
© Nielsen; Showbuzzdaily; Variety Intelligence Platform Analysis
VIP took our analysis back to the first week of December as a base point for comparisons. This enabled us to avoid setting a baseline distorted by the massive news-cycle surges around the election and the riot in January, and to show the viewership trend over a three-month period.
Beginning first with total audience, it's clear that CNN is the network that misses Trump the most. Trump-bashing tirades lack their zip with their protagonist taking on a much lower profile post-election, with
CNN Tonight with Don Lemon and
Anderson Cooper 360 seeing their average audience in the first week of March
one-third lower than the first week of December.
CNN isn't the only network to see declines, but they are the most pronounced. MSNBC's drops are around half of what CNN saw, with Chris Hayes (-16.7%) and Lawrence O'Donnell (-17.6%) seeing steeper declines than total primetime news leader Rachel Maddow (-9.1%).
Fox News has seen the smallest audience declines over the period, but it is interesting to note that Sean Hannity, who may have leaned more on his association to Trump than the others, has seen the greatest drops among Fox News' primetime lineup, down by double digits (-11.9%) versus
The Ingraham Angle (-9.2%) and
Tucker Carlson Tonight (-4.8%, the smallest decline seen across all primetime news titles).
© Nielsen; Showbuzzdaily; Variety Intelligence Platform Analysis
Comparing shows airing at 8 p.m. across the major news channels sees
Tucker Carlson Tonight with a slight (-5%) slump since Trump left office, compared with -18.3% for MSNBC's
All In With Chris Hayes and -33.3% for
Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN.
© Nielsen; Showbuzzdaily; Variety Intelligence Platform Analysis
. CNN's
Cuomo Prime Time fell by -31.3%
— versus a gain of 7.7% during impeachment week
— and continued to sink after. It was the same story for MSNBC's
Rachel Maddow Show, which grew by 10.1% during the impeachment but lost more than that (-22.3%) once the trial was over.
© Nielsen; Showbuzzdaily; Variety Intelligence Platform Analysis
© Nielsen; Showbuzzdaily; Variety Intelligence Platform Analysis
CNN also saw three of the four shows with the greatest audience declines among the key 25-54 demo. In fairness, only
Tucker Carlson Tonight didn't see double-digit declines, but the steep drops across all three CNN titles will be of concern.
In the first week of December, Anderson Cooper and Tucker Carlson were locked in a battle for 25-54 dominance, with Cooper pulling clear after the disgraceful scenes of the D.C. riot in early January.
Once Trump left office, so did Anderson Cooper's audience, impeachment aside, and the show entered March trailing Carlson.
The same pattern played out with
Cuomo Prime Time on CNN, only the ratings battle was with MSNBC, not Fox News. The first week of March saw Cuomo behind both
Hannity and the
Rachel Maddow Show, a far cry from the
heady days of January.
Unfortunately for the media, there is no easy fix. The next opportunity for Trump to dominate the headlines will be if he declares as a candidate for the 2024 elections in 2023, with over two years to go until that potential milestone. In the meantime, the left-leaning networks will have to rely on politicians making the occasional
gaffe and just get used to the post-Trump slump.
Reader Comments
I quit 40 yrs ago.