Oct 26 2009
CNN just not snarky and biased enough
Not in a world where the Joe Wilsons and Alan Graysons dominate headlines and the Keith Olbermanns and Glen Becks dominate airwaves. CNN’s prime-time ratings have been suffering for a while, but never has the news network had as much trouble drawing viewers as they did in October.
CNN was beaten handily by Fox (which isn’t anything new) but also lost to MSNBC and even CNN’s own sister network, HLN.
Individually it doesn’t get much better. Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. The CNN prime-time shows were beaten convincingly by all the Fox News programs and also lost to all of the MSNBC programs. Even re-runs of Nancy Grace and Keith Olbermann faired better than the original cable news network’s shows.
For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 in prime-time slots. Fox News on the other hand averaged 689,000 viewers and MSNBC averaged 250,000. HLN averaged 220,000.
“CNN’s ratings are always going to be more dependent on the news environment, much more so than opinion-based programming especially in prime time,” said CNN in a statement released on Monday.
Sources:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/cnn-drops-to-last-place-among-cable-news-networks/?hp
http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/1009/CNN_drops_to_4th_in_primetime.html?showall
Actually, I personally like CNN, for the most part because it is less biased - Lou Dobbs and Rick Sanchez are a little questionable and sometimes the network’s leads into certain stories are as well, but for the most part they are calm and rational.
What this really speaks to is where the American public is at this time which is as questionable as Lou Dobb, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh as well as the biases the public are feeling.
I don’t like news that tells me, overtly or covertly, how I should think and feel on any given subject - I just want the facts but from these “polls” it would seem that the average person wants to be lead, influenced and manipulated and you see where that is taking us.
Yeah I like CNN the most out of all of the cable news networks (it should be noted though I really don’t like the coverage of issues that all our cable news networks choose to go over).
While they aren’t completely unbiased (impossible to be with that much corporate sponsorship), they’re easily the most unbiased out of all of the rest of the networks. Plus Anderson Cooper is the man!