CNN has been in a lot of trouble recently. Their ratings and viewership have been plummeting ever since Trump left office and they have been working desperately to stop the bleeding. While the new CEO was hoping shifting away from partisan politics would help, it looks like it could be backfiring already.
The well known Cable News Network is expected to pull in just $956.8 million in 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, the New York Times reported. This would mark the first time since 2016 that CNN failed to reach the $1 billion in a single fiscal year.
The news comes as CNN’s new CEO, Chris Licht, had set out to hit $1.1 billion in profit by the end of his first year in charge. Licht fought furiously this year to try and weed out the anti-Trump, anti-Republican bias on the network, even threatening to fire their leading news anchors to try and reclaim some of their lost audience.
Despite his best efforts, however, CNN’s ratings have continued to plummet with many of their one-time viewers turning away from the network after their shift to the middle.
According to DailyMail, “The network has decreased in viewership by 27% since last year as an average of 639,000 tuned in this quarter, according to a report. MSNBC viewership is down by 23%. Meanwhile, Fox News viewership is up by 1%.”
Here are some of the comments from Twitter about the move:
When Licht took over, he made a series of changes to the network hoping for the best. That included officially ending CNN’s brand new streaming service, CNN+, which the network had spent over $300 million to launch. The service only managed to net between 5,000 to 10,000 users and the company is still paying off debts and contracts associated with the launch.
It still may be too early to tell if CNN’s new “moderate” spin will work out for the network. For now, at least, it seems to be another big failure for the one-time news-titan. Do you think CNN can still make a comeback or is this just its slow death spiral?
