CNN ratings in death spiral; prime-time viewership plunges 45% in past five weeks

CNN’s cratering ratings early in the post-Trump era were no fluke.

The vehemently anti-Trump network has seen a 45% drop in its prime-time audience in the last five weeks, The Washington Post reported Monday.

“Of all Donald Trump’s prophecies and predictions — that Mexico would pay for a border wall, that the coronavirus would spontaneously disappear, that he would be easily reelected — at least one wasn’t entirely wrong,” writer Paul Farhi noted before detailing the ratings landslide.

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CNN previously lost 44% of its total audience in the last week of January, which included “Cuomo Prime Time” shedding viewers age 25-54 “by more than half” (1.38 million to .45 million in the key demographic).

“The most deeply affected network is CNN,” the newspaper concluded after analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. “MSNBC’s audience has dropped 26 percent in the same period. Fox News — the most Trump-friendly of the three networks in its prime-time opinion shows — has essentially regained its leading position by standing still; its ratings have fallen just 6 percent since the first weeks of the year. The cable networks declined to discuss their ratings outlook for this article.”

The conservative website Hotair recently speculated that CNN’s woes may be correlated with its 2020 support for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo prior to the Democrat’s COVID-19 nursing home scandal and accusations by former aides of sexual misconduct.

“This is the network that gave viewers The Cuomo Brothers Show in 2020, with Chris propagandizing for his brother Andrew,” Ed Morrisey wrote March 13. “Andrew’s multiple scandals — especially the nursing-home scandal, with a potential body count in the thousands — exposed CNN’s crude narrative-building of Andrew as their anti-Trump. Having feted Andrew as ‘the Love Gov’ in 2020, a nickname with a sick connotation after multiple allegations of sexual harassment have emerged, CNN may be suffering not just a nadir of viewers’ political interest but a cratering of credibility as well that goes well beyond Trump.”