As the news cycle has calmed under Joe Biden’s presidency and the pandemic has eased, US media groups have suffered dramatic audience declines, with primetime ratings for cable television news networks CNN and MSNBC falling more than 50 per cent in the third quarter compared with a year ago.
Last year’s cocktail of Donald Trump, a deadly pandemic, the US presidential election and historic racial protests drove a record interest in following the news — propelling cable TV channels, newspapers and other journalistic enterprises to soaring heights of viewership and revenue.
Now, these groups face an equally breathtaking fall back down to earth.
Primetime ratings for AT&T-owned CNN dropped 52 per cent in the third quarter for viewers aged 25 to 54, a key demographic for advertisers, according to Nielsen figures. MSNBC, the left-leaning network owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, suffered a 51 per cent fall, while Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing Fox News faired comparatively better, with primetime ratings falling 37 per cent during the quarter for this demographic.
“This is uncharted waters after the Trump bump,” said Ken Doctor, founder of a California news start-up, Lookout. “It’s highly unlikely we will see another bump like that over the next 10 years.”
~
~
The fallout is not limited to television. The New York Times in the first half of this year added 443,000 digital subscribers, a steep slowdown from the 1.2m added in the first half of 2020.
Meredith Kopit Levien, New York Times chief executive, told investors in May that the news cycles of the past five years had fuelled “unprecedented demand for Times journalism”. However she added that “we are very confident that there is still wide interest in the news”. “I don’t think the world is getting any less interesting,” Kopit Levien said. “I don’t think it’s getting any less complex.”
On a tangential note:
~
~
https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d011a