CNN Scores Lowest Ratings in Years on Toxic Train Disaster Townhall

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You have to give it to the ever-so-fine folks over at CNN. They keep trying to do the same old things that used to work for the network 10 years ago and recapture some of their former glory but unfortunately keep coming up with more of the modern-day result.

Which is a failure.

CNN CEO Chris Licht has really been trying to change the fortune of the network and its reputation since he took over last year but it seems as though the network might be a smidge snake bit, considering all the things that CNN has made the news for, instead of just reporting the news.

Here are just a few examples…

So much for the “former” Most Trusted Name in News after putting up the huge UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT sign to attract new viewers or gain back old ones.

Now comes news that CNN, in one of their famed and vaunted Town Hall live telecasts, had the lowest ratings in close to four years. These CNN Town Hall events used to be must-see and must-report television all across the fruited plain. However, this last one, hosted by Jake Tapper last week about the train derailment in East Palestine Ohio, barely made a ripple.

According to Radar Online:

Notably, the televised event, during which Tapper moderated a discussion with Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and residents impacted by the catastrophe, was the lowest-rated primetime town hall since June 2019.

Nielsen ratings show it was also one of CNN’s lowest-rated telecasts of the year thus far, averaging 446,000 viewers and 101,000 in the 25-54 demo.

RadarOnline.com has learned that FNC, on the other hand, took over the timeslot with triple-digit percentages, averaging 2.4 million viewers and 289,000 in the 25-54 demo.

You could still go to Fox News Channel at 11 pm and have Gutfeld wipe the floor with those numbers that Jake from State ~~Farm~~ Media put up over a legitimate and tragic news story.

That CNN went to one of its old standby ratings platforms for a town hall meeting on a topic that has been making news across the country over the past two weeks and came this short really tells you how far they have fallen. This also tells you how much damage Jeff Zucker did to CNN during his turn as CEO.

Zucker, particularly during the Trump era, turned CNN into an anti-Trump platform and sacrificed people who were legitimate news figures for that goal. So while CNN had a loyal mouth-breathing anti-Trump audience, viewers with any measure of sanity tuned out. Now that Licht is trying to correct the years of abuse that were done to CNN’s brand he is running into this type of result with ratings in the basement.

Yet, I have to give him credit where it is due.

He got rid of Brian Stelter, who was the joke of all jokes on cable news. And, he has been slowly and methodically trying to evaluate all of the “talent” still on the network to see if they fit with the future going forward. That job probably does not pay nearly enough.

Possibly, it is just time to realize that Jake Tapper, who turned from a legitimate reporter when he was at ABC News covering the White House and has somehow morphed into a media lap dog, is not worth watching. Particularly his defending anything and everything at CNN could be part of the issue. Maybe it just could be as simple as folks just don’t trust Jake.

I, for one, would actually like it if Fox News had some competition and a new generation of reporters was trained up that went after the story regardless of where it may lead. If they didn’t ease up on public figures and political figures that may or may not be doing something wrong and get to the bottom of the story would be nice.

No matter what said reporters’ personal feelings were.Because we should not care about feelings in media unless it is about your favorite ice cream flavor which I still don’t care about.

Hopefully, the slogan from decades ago of CNN being the “Most Trusted Name in News” can possibly (by the end of this decade) be upgraded to “You Can Trust us More Than Those Wack Jobs at MSNBC.”

That would be interesting to see and overall good for the Republic of the United States of America.

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