As Ratings Nosedive, CNN Sticks to 24/7 January 6

BUCK: I’m just sitting here and I’m still just amazed. CNN all day long runs January 6 stuff. Are you aware of this? Some version.

CLAY: I’ve not had CNN on in a long time.

BUCK: So I sit here in the New York studio and we have monitors from all the different stations — and they’ve got the scrolling text at the bottom so even though I can’t hear what they’re saying I can read it and I can see what’s going on, and CNN to this day, honestly, every day, it does hours of some version of January 6th coverage. And I think it’s because they honestly don’t know what else they can do, ’cause their audience is so conditioned to be obsessed with this stuff and it just reminds me of the Twitter situation, because what you see is a lot of the media offerings that are out there are all about catering to a very thin wedge of the American electorate.

CLAY: Well, CNN internally, there are reports that many of their employees are losing their minds because CNN is trying to play it straighter as a typical news organization. Now, in quotation marks “straighter,” because we know how slanted they are. But there is a desperation as their ratings are plummeting more and more. And the sugary sweetness of the Trump era was actually far more beneficial to CNN and MSNBC than it has been to Fox News.

In fact, if you look at the data, Fox News has continued to expand its audience even without Trump. CNN and MSNBC have fallen completely off the radar. They’ve collapsed as news organizations because he was their reason for being, and they still have not been able to in 18 months of the Biden administration to figure out how to replace him. Trump is the star on the television show that has suddenly gotten killed off and there is nothing left in the television show.