Although I can't say I'm all that surprised (I certainly never watch it), the decline in viewership over at CNN is still staggering when it you see it in black and white. Even the network's silver golden boy, Anderson Cooper, has seen a 42 percent drop in viewers -- and that's during the tight T-shirt extravaganza that went on during his Haiti earthquake coverage.
The New York Times reports:
For the network’s longest-running host, Larry King, who has always been regarded at CNN as the centerpiece of prime time because he drew the biggest audiences at 9 p.m., the quarter was his worst ever.
Mr. King’s audience dropped 43 percent for the quarter and 52 percent in March. He dropped to 771,000 viewers for the quarter from 1.34 million in 2009. More alarming perhaps, Mr. King, whose show has been regularly eclipsed by Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC (and is almost quadrupled by Sean Hannity’s show on Fox), is now threatened by a new host, Joy Behar on HLN (formerly Headline News.)
Anderson Cooper has long been regarded as the strongest host at CNN, but his show has suffered badly as well. For the quarter, Mr. Cooper dropped 42 percent in viewers and 46 percent among the 25-to-54-year-old audience that the news channels use for their sales to advertisers.
In the past, CNN relied on big audiences for Mr. King’s show to deliver viewers to Mr. Cooper. Now Mr. Cooper sometimes finds himself losing to repeats of shows on MSNBC and HLN.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Tanking With Mr. Cooper
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2 comments:
Who wants to take bets that the management at CNN will continue to think that it's just that they need to be more like Fox Noise than less, without seeing that their viewers are leaving them in droves simply because you can already watch the Noise by just flipping the channel, you don't need CNN to be the "me too!" of cable...
I know it's tangential, but when will the New York Times stop with the silly Mr./Ms. addresses? When I'm reading about Mr. Cooper, it's just a little old-fashioned bit of nonsense, but when I'm reading about Mr. Hussein or Mr. Mugabe, it reads like the Times is giving respect to genocidal dictators.
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