American Media Madness - Cable & Network News Ratings

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Cable News

Fox News was rocked by an 8.0 mega quake the first week of June when the newest prime time host, Megyn Kelly, knocked the brash, cheeky and ever impertinent Bill O'Rielly off his prime time perch when she beat him in the key news demo, adults 25-54 for the week.  While O'Rielly remained #1 in total viewers with over 2.5 million Kelly was barely behind with over 2.4 million.

The two Fox powerhouses with Hannity at #3 and Greta Van Sustern helped Fox take 9 of the top 10 cable news shows for the week.  No hosted news show by MSNBC, CNBC or CNN made the top ten, just a special by CNBC, Shark Tank, and CNN's 1960s documentary.

CNN news continued it's troubles with the lowest key market ratings in 14 years. Second place MSNBC continued to be clobbered by Fox even as cable viewership continues to decline.  In virtually every time slot from Morning Joe to Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow in prime time Fox leads with 3 to 5 times the MSNBC audience.    

Network News

At the network level NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams remained first with 8.1 million viewers while ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer averaged 7.3 million and CBS's Evening News with Scott Pelley pulled 6.0 million viewers.

Morning shows continued to be dominated by ABC's Good Morning America with 5.5 million viewers followed by NBC's Today at 4.77 million and CBS's This Morning at 2.9 million.

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Rating the News Media - MSNBC Gears Up for Last Hurrah of Progressive Liberals

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One thing is clear in the latest Nielsen Ratings, the public is not being fooled by the news media and I use that term rather loosely when distinguishing between news and opinion shows since it is hard to tell the difference most days.

As we head into the fall television cycle and the upcoming Midterm elections it is hard to tell if the Democrats, incumbents, or media are suffering the most by misreading the mood of the public. Clearly the polls and primary election results demonstrate the Democrats and incumbents are lost in their ivory towers as they are in serious trouble and have no clue why.

This year will be one of lost opportunities for the Democrats and even more so for the progressive liberals. They have thrown away, wasted or blown one of the greatest majorities for an unknown and untested president and his party ever handed to politicians in our history.

Right now Obama and the Democratic majority are on the verge of showing one of the greatest falls from grace ever witnessed in politics. Look for the president's party to lose control and around 55 seats in the House, and maybe 9-10 seats and possibly control of the Senate, just two years after Obama's triumphant coronation as president.

Yet the impact on the progressive liberal media who helped power Obama into office could be even more devastating. For the media have ignored or failed to read the tea leaves to an even greater degree than the Obama, Pelosi and Reid people.

Just look at some of the numbers. In August only one network news anchor gained audience, Diane Sawyer at ABC according to the Nielsen numbers. Sawyer continued to close the gap against NBC while Katie Couric is buried in last place.

When it comes to cable news and/or opinion the stats are staggering. MSNBC is the clear bastion of progressive liberalism. Throughout the year they have continued to add progressive mouthpieces to their program mix while attempting to bolster the sagging numbers of their progressive philosophy. The result has been suicidal.

HNL's non-political Morning Express hosted by Robin Meade has buried the MSNBC far left leaning Morning Joe Show for 17 consecutive months as Robin has driven her ratings up 25%-28% in key demos and leads the Morning Joe show by a stunning 66% for the year to date.

As Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC token Republican on the Morning Joe Show, has drifted farther and farther from the GOP viewpoint the ratings of MSNBC have dropped. Just today Joe justified his MSNBC credentials by being about the only Republican on earth to say the GOP will not win control of the House in the elections. If he keeps it up he will beat out Howard Dean for the next leader of the Democratic National Committee.

Fox News is clobbering MSNBC in every single time slot, generally pulling three to four times higher ratings than MSNBC in daytime and prime time programming. For example, Glenn Beck beats Chris Matthews with over 2.1 million viewers to 464,000 for Matthews, O'Rielly beats Olbermann 2.5 million to 782,000, and Hannity beats Rachel Maddow 1.95 million to 610,000 in late August numbers. Note that Hannity often has Sarah Palin on his program.

Then there is CNN, who claims to be the last truly fair and balanced network. Yet they have Rick Sanchez and his progressive agenda on the Rick's List program and even added the liberal to their prime timeline up where his new show has lost 40% of the audience over the previous year. This past week his prime time show pulled just 92,000 viewers while a CNBC show (financial network) about McDonald's Big Mac pulled 143,000 viewers compared to a couple of million viewers on Fox.

CNN primetime average viewership hit a ten year low of just 486,000 in August while the Total Day viewership average of 381,000 was the fifth time this year it had one of the ten worst viewership months since August of 2000. Even Larry King lost 50% of his audience in just the last year.

So what is the lesson? If the media owners of MSNBC and CNN continue to push the progressive liberal agenda they will continue to alienate the Main Street viewers and may soon find themselves becoming an endangered species like many of the radical causes they advocate. Perhaps they should consider adding a little news content to their programming.

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Who Can You Trust?

So we gave you our pick for the Queen of Network News Diane Sawyer, the Kentucky girl who rules ABC News. Diane proved that beauty and brains can be combined when she won the America's Junior Miss scholarship pageant and went on to break down all the doors of television news for women becoming the highest paid woman in network news.

However, not even that is good enough for the CPT Who Do You Trust? honor. The person must demonstrate a strict adherence to the ancient rules of journalism where you are objective, fair, unbiased, and never ever try to advocate a political philosophy or cause. Diane stands alone on network TV in this regard.

Today we are announcing the winner of the cable news Who Do You Trust? honor and once again beauty and brains are packaged in the Queen of Cable News, Robin Meade, anchor of CNN Express morning news. Robin was Miss Ohio and a Miss America finalist and went on to broadcast journalism in Ohio, Florida and Chicago before joining CNN.


You can find her every morning lighting up CNN Headline news where most CNN news personalities will put you to sleep. Many shows on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and whoever claim to be fair, unbiased and no spin but they are liars of course and all have an agenda to push on the unsuspecting public from right wing to left wing, conservative to liberal, and I for one am sick of hearing them tell me what to think.

You want a refreshing, upbeat news report go to Diane or Robin. They stand alone in preserving journalistic integrity. Interesting that they came from neighboring midwestern states.