Where does cable news still matter? Airports and hotel lobbies, for one. But also in the imaginations of people in and around Washington, D.C.
Paul Farhi writes for the Washington Post about the decline of cable news:
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.
Perhaps even more distressing, from CNN’s perspective, is that poor performance for TV in general was actually a good night for CNN.
CNN averaged 587,000 viewers in prime time for the month of April. The top-rated show was Anderson Cooper 360, with an average of 782,000 viewers.
In the same month, Fox News averaged over 2 million prime-time viewers. MSNBC averaged 1.3 million. Newsmax and NewsNation were both below 200,000 each.
It bears repeating: The Trump town hall made good business sense for CNN. That’s why CNN did it. Despite all the criticism CNN executives got, they’d likely do it again in a heartbeat. How else are they going to get over 3 million people to watch their channel?
Cable-news executives aren’t playing to win their time slots. They’re playing to not lose quite as badly as their competitors. They know they’ll get stomped by Survivor or Chicago P.D. or NCIS just about every night. CNN has been performing poorly, so it makes sense for the channel to bring Trump on and crush MSNBC once in a while, while still losing handily to network dramas.
Farhi writes about the long-term problem that cable news faces:
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.
Streaming isn’t a replacement for the revenue that cable generates, Farhi explains. Fox Nation has been the most successful attempt by a cable-news channel to get into streaming, but it isn’t even close to replacing cable revenue. “At $6 a month, Fox Nation’s subscribers (said to be 1.5 million strong two years ago) generate far less than 10 percent of the $3 billion Fox News collected from cable providers and advertisers last year,” Farhi writes.
The other problem that Farhi mentions in passing is that the average cable-news viewer is over the age of 60. That’s one reason why the debate about the “working class” vs. the “professional class” for cable-news audiences isn’t very important. Most viewers are part of the no-longer-working class — they’re retired.
Where does cable news still matter? Airports and hotel lobbies, for one. But also in the imaginations of people in and around Washington, D.C. That may be a reflection of gerontocracy; senators are prime age for cable news. It’s still seen as prestigious to get a cable-news show, or even make an appearance on one. Hardly anyone’s actually watching.