CNN Ratings, 11 Months Into the Year It's Still Fox and the Fogies

In the demos you get paid for Fox had 297,000 while the combine had 532,000. Fox News continues to dominate the fogies while MSNBC, CNN and Headline garner the middle aged.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Here's a snapshot on the success, or lack thereof, on CNN's news efforts this year. It's been a long time since I had access to the numbers -- they were no longer available to me after Jeff Zucker took over as CNN's CEO. But this week Cynopsis published the numbers for the year, up to December 8th.

First, Fox News gets by far the most viewers, second almost all the viewers are ancient. Fox News boasted an average total of 1,770,000 on a daily basis, but only 297,000 were between 25-54 and those are the numbers that advertisers pay for. MSNBC was second, averaging 645,000 viewers but they had 203,000 in the 25-54 age group. CNN finished third--578,000 total, 187,000 25-54s and Headline News came in 403,000 and 142,000 in the 25-54 demo.

If you add the numbers you'll discover that Fox News by itself had more total day viewers than the other three combined (1,770,000 for Fox News 1,626,000 for the combine). In the demos you get paid for Fox had 297,000 while the combine had 532,000. Fox News continues to dominate the fogies while MSNBC, CNN and Headline garner the middle aged. Percentage wise, just 17 percent of Fox News viewers are between 25 and 54 while 33 percent of the combine audience is in that demo.

If one assumes that Fox News viewers are conservatives and the other three networks cater to liberals, there are 8 percent fewer liberal viewers than conservatives and that would indicate that Republicans would triumph in the November 2014 elections. However, given the proportion of younger voters who no longer watch television but get their information from Internet websites, I'm not sure that the television comparisons are accurate, so from here on in I'm going to try to track Politico, Yahoo News, Huffington Post, CNN, etc., so I'll be prepared for the 2016 Presidential election. I'll try to keep you informed of my progress.

If there's one thing for sure, if only those over 55 come to the polls, it will be a good year for the GOP.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot