CNN’s primetime viewership plunged to 497,000 in July—a 42 percent drop from the same time last year—leaving the network far behind its cable news rivals, according to multiple reports Tuesday.
The network “averaged only 497,000 total viewers in prime time for the month of July, despite unrelenting waves of major news,” journalist Oliver Darcy reported on his Substack. “MSNBC, by comparison, averaged 865,000 total viewers. Meanwhile, Fox News averaged 2.41 million viewers.”
While Darcy’s Substack is only available to paid subscribers, former CNN host Chris Cillizza quoted from the report in an X post, describing the numbers as “disastrously bad.”
The figures indicate that CNN viewership dropped 42 percent from last year, Deadline reported.
CNN’s finances and ratings have cratered in recent years. The liberal network’s revenue tanked by around $400 million in three years, according to financial metrics revealed at a defamation trial in January.
In June, CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery announced it will split into two publicly traded companies, cutting CNN off from the more profitable streaming business as the left-leaning network faces plummeting ratings. It is so far unclear how the split will affect CNN’s own streaming platform, which was announced in May, three years after its catastrophic $300 million first attempt at streaming.
CNN anchors may be facing cost-cutting measures in response. Incoming CEO Gunnar Wiedenfels, whom Variety described as an “iron-fisted money manager,” will “almost certainly take aim at the bloated salaries of CNN’s top anchors,” the Washington Free Beacon reported last month. Wiedenfels’s likely targets include Anderson Cooper, who makes $18 million per year, and Jake Tapper, who holds a “multiyear” deal worth a “low-eight-figure” salary, according to Puck journalist Dylan Byers.
CNN fared no better over the full broadcast day than it did in primetime, according to the latest figures, averaging just 370,000 total viewers, compared with Fox News’s 1.5 million and MSNBC’s 530,000. In the key 25–54 demographic, CNN averaged 92,000 viewers—down 55 percent from last year—edging out MSNBC’s 81,000, but trailing far behind Fox News’s 257,000.
Fox News, meanwhile, reported that it “has now topped both CNN and MSNBC during primetime for 54 straight months.”
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