Ouch:
Unfortunately for CNN, “Piers Morgan Tonight” was the apparent victim of the busy night, drawing only 39,000 viewers 25-54 at 9 PM. To say those ratings are anomalous would be something of an understatement. That is the lowest 9 PM weekday demo rating for CNN since at least 1997. While the ratings were an outlier, it was a fairly normal edition of “PMT,” with Morgan hosting. Guests included Jane Lynch and “The man with the golden voice” Ted Williams.
“PMT” drew 284,000 total viewers, which was down from a typical weekday, but not a record-breaking low.
“PMT”s lead-in and lead-out, “AC360,” drew around 90,000 demo viewers at both 8 and 10 PM, also down from a typical weekday this year.
Last week on Twitter, Piers Morgan taunted me with an invitation to come on his show and debate. We responded in the most serious way we could; we reached out directly to his producer and said, “anytime.”
Haven’t heard back.
Kind of glad now. I can get more attention strolling through a supermarket.
A bad day for the MSM is a good day for America, and today is a very good day for America.
To be fair, though, CNN’s problem isn’t just Piers Morgan. It’s that through the years, the network’s brand as a whole has been tarnished.
This is what happens when you insult your audience by pretending to be objective; what happens when you utilize dishonest fact-checking to downplay stories inconvenient to your left-wing agenda; what happens when you bring conservatives on in an attempt to embarrass them, only to see it backfire; what happens when you carry Obama’s racially divisive Trayvon Martin water and get it as wrong as anyone can; and what happens when some of your so-called talent is smug, ill-informed, insulting, and not terribly interesting.
CNN has a brand problem. For all their lunacy, at least MSNBC doesn’t insult their audience by hiding behind a phony shield of objectivity. Fox News does it exactly right by drawing a clear line between their straight news and opinion programs.
CNN should simply step out of the closet. Things can’t get any worse for them, that’s for sure. Not only that, they could probably do better than MSNBC because they have smarter people and, to be fair, some actual journalists, like Dana Bash.
Reporting the news and the events of the day with your biases and agenda clearly advertised is, yes, a virtue. It’s also the future. I know the Left is terrified to fight for their ideas out in the open. If my ideas were that bad, I would be scared too.
But it’s either that or extinction, MSM.
Your choice.
Either way, I’m popping the popcorn. There’s nothing more entertaining than a reckoning.