AP reports cable news networks were the primary form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. Now those legacy television outlets, alongside digital and print news organizations, are suffering big-time in a post-Trump world.
In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38 percent at CNN, 34 percent at Fox News Channel, and 25 percent at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company.
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This loss was despite mass lockdowns and more people being forced to stay at home and seek their news from confirmed sources, all while the passage of time keeps showing Trump was ahead of his critics on a host of controversial issues.
The refusal was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12 percent at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News;” 14 percent at NBC’s “Nightly News,” Nielsen said. All those figures stand against 2020 when the presidential election and coronavirus pandemic combined to drive intense audience engagement to traditional, established news outlets.
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Pushing Trump off Twitter and Facebook also worked to dilute his news presence to the loss of mainstream publishers who are finding President Joe Biden is just not attracting audiences like his predecessor.
The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like the New York Times and Washington Post, according to the AP report.
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Yet readers are walking away; Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44 percent in November compared to November 2020, and down 34 percent at the Times.
AP describes those networks as staying focused on politics even as viewership interest drops. The media monitoring company NewsWhip looked at 14 million political articles online last year and saw they had an average of 924 engagements or social media interactions.
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The 13.5 million articles NewsWhip traced in 2021 had slumped to an average of 321 engagements.
The year 2021 was one moment of tumult in the news biz: Chris Cuomo fired, Brian Williams’ surprise exit, Chris Wallace bolting for a rival. And that is not even getting to the daily headlines about Tucker Carlson’s vaccine doubts and distortions, the “great replacement” theory or January 6th false flags.
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A lot of this was to be expected, as the news cycle moved on from the four-alarm fires of the Trump Administration and the momentous nature of a presidential election year.
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