There’s a moment in every slow-motion disaster where the people involved stop pretending everything’s fine. For CNN, that moment is now. The network that once dominated cable news has lost nearly two-thirds of its primetime audience since 2016, and the obituary writers are sharpening their pencils.
From 1.3 million primetime viewers to 553,000. January was even uglier — 488,000. Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, Kaitlan Collins — the entire primetime roster combined couldn’t fill a mid-size college football stadium. Daytime isn’t any better. Wolf Blitzer’s audience dropped from 752,000 to 433,000. Compared to 2021, primetime is down 71 percent. Daytime is down 73.
Those aren’t declines. That’s a network being slowly unplugged.
They Earned This
CNN didn’t lose its audience in a freak accident. This wasn’t a natural disaster or an industry disruption that nobody saw coming. They made a choice — every single day, for nearly a decade — to be the anti-Trump network. Not a news network that occasionally criticized Trump. The anti-Trump network. That was the brand. That was the product. And they committed to it with the kind of all-in dedication that would be admirable if it had been aimed at actual journalism.
Russia collusion. Remember that? CNN ran with it like it was the moon landing. Night after night, panel after panel, breathless anchor after breathless anchor — all pushing a story that turned out to be built on opposition research and FBI leaks. When the Mueller report landed with a thud, CNN didn’t apologize. They didn’t fire anyone. They didn’t even pause. They just pivoted to the next anti-Trump narrative and kept the machine running.
The audience noticed. Not all at once. Viewers don’t leave in a single dramatic exodus. They drift. They flip the channel one night and don’t flip back. They realize the panel discussions are all the same people saying the same things with the same predetermined conclusions. And eventually the habit breaks, and they’re gone.
The Scott Jennings Exception
One man on that entire network consistently tells the truth, and his name is Scott Jennings. He’s become CNN’s most viral personality — not because the network promotes him, but because clips of him dismantling his co-panelists travel across social media like wildfire. People don’t tune into CNN to watch Jennings. They watch the clips afterward and think, “How does that guy survive in that building?”
He’s the one honest voice in a choir singing the same off-key hymn. And the fact that he’s the only one generating real audience engagement should tell CNN everything they need to know about what viewers actually want. They won’t listen, of course. But the data is right there.
The Sale Rumors
When your viewership drops by two-thirds, people start circling. The Daily Mail reports that CNN’s cratering numbers are fueling rumors of a network sale. CNN’s parent company denies it. They’d have to — admitting you’re shopping a sinking ship doesn’t exactly drive the price up.
But the math doesn’t lie. Advertisers pay for eyeballs. When you lose 71 percent of your primetime audience, the ad revenue follows. And when the ad revenue drops, the cost-cutting starts. And when the cost-cutting starts at a network full of people who think they’re saving democracy by reading teleprompters, the ego collisions are going to be spectacular.
The Washington Post Preview
CNN should be watching what’s happening to the Washington Post very carefully. Same disease, same trajectory. A legacy media institution that decided ideological commitment was more important than audience trust, and is now watching the consequences arrive in real time.
The Post is hemorrhaging subscribers. CNN is hemorrhaging viewers. Both are blaming “alternative media” and “changing consumption habits” — which is the media equivalent of a restaurant blaming Yelp instead of the food. People aren’t leaving because they found other screens to look at. They’re leaving because they stopped trusting what was on the screen.
The Reckoning That Never Came
Here’s what grinds. After 2016, CNN should have had a reckoning. They were wrong about everything. The polls, the predictions, the Russia narrative, the smug certainty that Trump was a temporary glitch in the system. A responsible news organization would have done some soul-searching. Would have fired the people who got it catastrophically wrong. Would have rebuilt credibility from the ground up.
Instead, they doubled down. Then tripled. Then kept going until the audience was a third of what it used to be and the only person generating buzz was the one conservative they kept around as a sparring partner.
CNN didn’t get killed by Fox News or podcasts or social media. CNN got killed by CNN. They chose the narrative over the news, and the viewers chose the door.
553,000. That’s not a cable news network. That’s a podcast with a really expensive studio.