Since former President Donald Trump’s departure in January, CNN lost nearly 50 percent of its prime-time audience.
While Fox News only saw a 6 percent drop in ratings, other cable news outlets and corporate media publications also saw a significant decline in their viewership and readership after President Joe Biden’s inauguration. MSNBC was one of the many left-leaning networks that lost more than 20 percent of its audience. The Washington Post and New York Times also suffered “plummeting” website traffic.
“The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26 percent from January to February, and 7 percent from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17 percent compared with January and 16 percent over last February,” an analysis in the Post concluded.
This drop in readers and viewers comes after corporate media outlets obsessed over Trump for four years, often pushing bogus narratives meant to hurt the president’s standing with Americans as well as his re-election chances. Trump predicted the recent decline of “fake news” readers and viewers as early as 2017.
“Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because, without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.” Trump proclaimed.
Leftist mouthpieces at CNN such as Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta were often quick to take aim at Trump when he was in office, spending much of their coverage on criticizing his administration and agenda.
This goes for people in the administration went along with Trump downplaying this virus. Oh now you trust the science?!
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) December 21, 2020
Trump used his speech to the troops in Iraq to attack Democrats: “The Democrats don’t want to let us have strong borders.” (Presumably, many of the soldiers listening to his remarks are not registered Republicans) pic.twitter.com/M1MWCLkMMb
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) December 27, 2018
If someone managed to sleep through the Trump years, and asked me what they'd missed, I'd start with "enemy of the people." Why? Because Trump's demonization of the media explains almost everything… https://t.co/MvN7998Iug
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 29, 2020
Shortly after the president was deplatformed by Twitter, Facebook, and other big tech companies seeking to censor him and after years of raging against him, corporate media immediately returned to writing puff pieces on the incoming Biden administration. Most of the articles were directed at fawning over Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of shoes, the inauguration playlist, and Biden’s love for ice cream, while others flatly refused to criticize the incoming administration’s lies and mistakes with the same scrutiny used against Trump.
