CNN’s Battering Continues

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 28, 8:30AM EDT

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CNN’s Battering Continues — © Mike Coppola / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

CNN invented 24-hour cable news. Now, it is an also-ran in the industry, bested by MSNBC and Fox News. As its ratings sank lower, debt-laded parent Warner Bros. Discovery cannot depend on it for the cash necessary to climb out from under a back-breaking balance sheet. (These industries are laying off the most workers.)
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According to The Wall Street Journal, CNN boss Chris Licht, has presided over a drop in the network’s fortunes. “In March, CNN is set to post its lowest monthly rating in at least three decades among adults 25 to 54, a key demographic for advertisers.” It plans to hire morning superstar Gayle King and, for some reason, former basketball player Charles Barkley. That may be the oddest programming decision in the history of morning TV.
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CNN’s stars cannot pull the network out of its ratings funk. These include Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer. Both have been evening news and prime-time staples and were the cores around which CNN’s other programs were built. Their best days are behind them.
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Fox News, conservative to its core, took the ratings lead from CNN years ago. This was bolstered by the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and his four years as president. Fox is in trouble because of a $1.6 billion suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, claiming that it was defamed as Fox hosts wrongly criticized the function of its voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. Based on testimony, the Fox News attacks were nearly a conspiracy by hosts to bring the company down.
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MSNBC, long the third-place cable news network, has moved into a solid second place, and CNN is not likely to dislodge it, based on current ratings numbers.

CNN may have invented 24-hour cable news, but it is now the industry’s sole failure.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.