Every day the corporate run media follow the same pattern. And the result is always this:
Just seconds after Donald Trump appeared at his new hotel in Washington on Friday, it dawned on many of the reporters in the room and others watching the live coverage on every cable news channel that they had been conned.
Driven in part by interest in the 2016 presidential campaign, viewership increased for cable news channels in 2015.
In prime time – the premier time slot for advertisers – combined average viewership rose for the three major news channels (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) by 8% to 3.1 million, according to Pew Research Center analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. The cable viewership increase was largely due to CNN, which experienced an especially sharp uptick, growing its evening viewership 38% to an average of 712,000 viewers. Cable-hosted presidential candidate debates helped drive some of the surge in viewership. Fox remained the evening viewership leader with 1.8 million (up 3% over 2014 levels). MSNBC was down 1% to 579,000.
Daytime viewership grew as well for these three 24-hour news channels in 2015. Between the hours of 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., average viewership for the three channels combined increased 9% to 2 million
Apparently, the audience for cable news is not quite as significant as one would think.
Pew Research Center
