Anti-Trump media in a predicament as ratings nosedive
February 5, 2021 in News by RBN Staff
Source: One News Now
For the last four years, CNN and MSNBC – and to a lesser degree, Fox News – made a good living covering every little thing they could find about President Trump, regardless if it was true. As the 2020 elections loomed and even for a time afterwards, Fox News – a longtime leader among the cable news outlets – found itself in third place.
Now, Trump is out of office and the cable news world is returning to a sort of normalcy. CNN, which was in first place the first week of January, dropped more than half of its viewers and fell to third in the last week of the month. MSNBC was second; and Fox regained first place, although both of those networks were down compared to the beginning of January.
Kyle Drennen of Media Research Center says CNN has been feasting on Trump for four years. “CNN are victims of their own success,” Drennen tells One News Now. “Their team won – but guess what? Now people don’t feel like they need to watch CNN anymore.”
He expects it will be interesting over the next couple of years to see if the mainstream news media will maintain their role of Biden “cheerleader” – or if they’ll abandon their anti-Trump activism and start acting like the press is supposed to act.
“If things don’t go well with the vaccine rollout … [or] if there are other issues and challenges that happen and don’t seem to be handled well, people are going to have questions,” he opines. “The media’s not just going to be able to sit there and say, ‘Oh, everything’s fine. Don’t worry.'”
As for the millions of viewers who have abandoned cable news completely, Drennen points out they have a lot of choices.
“There’s so many different news websites out there – conservative, center, left-leaning ones. [And] there’s a lot of citizen-journalists out there now. Just get a wide variety of news,” he urges.
On a related note, The Associated Press acknowledges that the media is “grappling” with how to cover the post-White House Trump. Somehow, AP reports, the 45th president has managed to keep a hold on the public’s attention – despite being two weeks removed from office and suspended from his Twitter account.
“A measurement of news page views online shows Trump had more than double the attention of President Joe Biden on most days in January – before and after Biden’s inauguration,” says AP. And with an unprecedented second impeachment trial set to begin next week, “that’s not likely to end anytime soon,” says the news service.