Posted on 05/24/2023 2:24:41 PM PDT by Salman
After a week of promotion and controversy, CNN staged a live town hall telecast with Donald Trump this month that was studded with the former president’s insults and falsehoods. It drew thunderous criticism — but strikingly few eyeballs.
The 70-minute broadcast attracted an audience of just 3.3 million viewers, about a third less than the number of people watching an episode of “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune” on ABC the same night.
The tepid response may reflect Trump’s waning drawing power, or the fact that the town hall aired eight months before primary voting begins. But it also tells an ominous tale about cable news’s declining influence and troubled business model.
As recently as 2016, when Trump was narrowly elected president, just over 70 percent of all households with a TV had cable or satellite TV subscriptions. Today the figure is just under 40 percent, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, a research firm. And it’s dropping fast.
During the first quarter of 2023, another 2.3 million customers (or 7 percent of the total) cut the cord to traditional cable — the fastest cancel-my-subscription pace ever recorded, according to MoffettNathanson, another research firm. The company estimates the number of homes receiving TV via cable is now about the same as it was in 1992, when the industry was still on the rise.
“Cable news is dying,” wrote Alan Wolk, a veteran advertising executive and media consultant, in a recent newsletter about the TV industry. “Not because it’s become irrelevant, but because the medium it lives on, cable TV, is dying.” He predicts that cable could, “for all intents and purposes, disappear” within a decade.
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(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This article seemed to be more about Trump bashing than cable news.
they were multitasking
it may be post policy that every article has to bash Trump
even if it is about gardening
cable tv cannot die fast enough
no more subsidizing the LEFTIST media with the basic bundle
I like cable news when it tells the truth and is not hopelessly slanted against conservatism and Christianity. You don’t see that much anymore.
I like cable news when it tells the truth and is not hopelessly slanted against conservatism and Christianity. You don’t see that much anymore.
3.3 million viewers is ten times more than what CNN usually gets and it’s what the evening broadcast (ABC, NBC, CBS) usually get.
Why doesn’t this clown Paul Farhi say that NOBODY watches ANY cable “news” propaganda channels. Which is still far more than the readership of the Washington Compost.
OR...the fact that it was on CNN (for whom this audience was 5X it's current levels)
Podcasts and online are where the action is now.
“Get an antenna and an over the air DVR for local stuff.”
Exactly what I have except no dvr.
MSM has no credibility except for the gullible.
Cable news has been sputtering for a long while.
Cable in general has been sputtering. Cable/satellite companies are losing hundreds of thousands each quarter.
Networks in general have been sputtering. A rating of 0.6 [around 5-6 million viewers] is now considered ‘good’ in the coveted 18-49 age group. Long gone are the nights in which a popular TV series would have 50 to 80 MILLION viewers.
TV in general was hit hard by COVID lockdowns. Now, writers are on strike, so the summer and fall look like an increase in ‘reality’/non-scripted shows.
This is an interesting forecast for the future of cable TV.
With so many people going to internet streaming , the cable and satellite business model May well be unsustainable.
In a few years, people may be saying, who watches cable TV , the way many people now say, who reads an actual newspaper?
All sable news networks combined only draw about 3 million ish total viewers a night over all of prime time.
Trump pulled in more eyeballs in an hour on 1 network than than all the cable news channels combined pull in over prime time, but yea, his draw is waining (rolling eyes).
More fake news
Cable could have gone al a carte, but they insisted on keeping the "you must buy the whole package to get even a single channel' model.
We will likely cut our cable soon...just is not worth it.
He could have live-streamed it without being on TV and pulled as many viewers.
WaPo quietly suspended one of its top reporters last spring
Paul Farhi was put on unpaid leave for five days. For what, precisely, is not entirely clear. But the Guild has protested.
By MAX TANI,
The Washington Post quietly suspended one of its longest serving reporters, Paul Farhi, this past spring, in a move challenged by the union representing the paper’s reporters.
The suspension of Farhi, a media reporter who has for years been tasked with writing about the paper itself, came on or about March 10 and lasted for five days, during which he was not paid. According to a complaint to compel arbitration filed by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild in D.C. district court, the Post claimed that Farhi had “jeopardized the safety of a colleague as well as the ability of The Washington Post to report in a foreign country.”
(Yet, he still has a job at the WaPo.)
I cut my cable in 2005.
I think I read where it drew about 3 times CNN's usual audience for that timeframe.
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