As awful as CNN’s ratings are, they’d be even lower if they didn’t have use endless supply of anti-Trump hysteria to fill their coverage. CNN President Jeff Zucker has now openly admitted that he believes it’s “our job to call them [the Trump administration] out,” and that Trump has been a gold rush for them.
CNN President Jeff Zucker admits using Trump outrage for ratings
How depressing is it that Zucker’s definition of a gold rush is bringing in ratings that are still beat out by children’s cartoons? That aside, Zucker’s revealing comments come in a feature-length article that’ll appear in Vanity Fair’s December print edition. Zucker explained why, in his words, Trump coverage “sucks up so much [of CNN’s] oxygen.”
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump. I’ve had too much Trump,'” he told Vanity Fair. “And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump. We’ve seen that anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away. So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.” A love-hate relationship for sure.
Ironically, Zucker was also the person who greenlit “The Apprentice” back in 2004, further solidifying “Donald Trump” as a household name.
Zucker did try to pretend that unlike MSNBC, his network brings on voices from “the other side.” He told Vanity Fair that, “On MSNBC, you rarely hear from people who do support Trump. We want to be home to both those points of view.”
While the Republicans CNN brings on may have an “R” next to their name, they’re hardly conservatives. When’s the last time you saw Ava Navarro, S.E. Cupp, Amanda Carpenter, or whacky guests like Bill Kristol, express a single right-wing opinion? While there are Republicans at CNN, they seem more interested in being liked by their liberals peers than defending conservative views in a hostile audience.
A “gold rush?” Even calling CNN’s ratings a “silver rush” would be generous
While CNN has a minuscule average daily audience of 700,000 today, since 2016, that figure in the pre-Trump area was an even more abysmal 400,000 average daily viewers. For reference, over at Fox Hannity averages 3.5 million viewers, Tucker Carlson 3.23 million, Laura Ingraham 2.97 million, Brett Baier 2.6 million, and even The Five brings in 2.84 million.
Indeed, earlier in the year the network that was experiencing a supposed “gold rush” had to lay off fifty employees, most of which were concentrated in the network’s digital initiatives.
CNN hasn’t yet struck gold – but maybe silver or copper? Who knows.
