CNN Hits Lowest Rated Week In Demo Since Jeff Zucker Took Over

January 23, 2014 in News by RBN Staff

Source: Deadline

After a week at the Sundance Film Festival, this probably wasn’t the first anniversary present Jeff Zucker was looking for. After a year on the job, the CNN boss received some double bad news today: From January 13-19, the cable news network had its worst week in the adults 25-54 demo in both total day and primetime since Zucker began running the place. In total day, CNN pulled in 78,000 viewers in the key news demo, the worst it has done since the week of May 14-20, 2012 when CNN drew 74,000 viewers among the 25-54s. In primetime numbers, CNN had 99,000 viewers in the demo last week, slightly more that the 96,000 it garnered for the week of July 30-August 5, 2012 in the heart of the last Presidential election. The previous lows of Zucker’s reign came the week of December 16-22, 2013, when CNN attracted 84,000 adults 25-54 and 106,000 viewers in primetime. By comparison to CNN’s bad week last week, Fox News Channel had 212,000 in the demo for total day and 261,000 in primetime. MSNBC drew 148,000 in total day and 235,000 in primetime.

Looking back over the past 12 months, CNN has fallen hard since the week the former NBCUniversal exec officially took over as president of CNN Worldwide; year-over-year, CNN was down 33% in total day from the comparable week a year before (January 14 – 20, 2013) and down 39% in primetime. Fox News actually saw a 3% bump from the 212,000 it had in adults 25-54 a year ago, while MSNBC dipped 5% from the 155,000. In primetime, Fox News was down 8% from the 283,000 viewers it had that week last year. Despite a rocky year with hosts and schedule changes, MSNBC actually went up 12% from the 209,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo that it had the week of January 14-20, 2013.