Monday, May 7, 2018

No One Watches CNN

On the whole, most Americans seem to be pretty hip to Fake News. Recent polls indicate that the majority believe the mainstream media to be biased and unreliable - a reassuring statistic in these times of absurdity. Some recent ratings of the 24-hour news channels look like this (in thousands):


Fox News is clearly the ratings winner and - ignoring HLN since it isn't 24-hour - CNN is by far the ratings loser. If you didn't watch the ratings, you'd assume CNN was the dominant outlet. They can break a story (real or otherwise) and the whole country is abuzz, yet Fox News counterpoint from conservatives like Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham gets relatively little response, even though Hannity has four times the viewership of his CNN counterpart. It would seem that CNN has more control over the national narrative, but Fox News is reaching many more viewers. It is debatable which position is preferable, but, considering that Republicans hold the House, Senate, Supreme Court, Presidency, and the vast majority of state offices, we have to suspect that it's better to be the silent majority than the noisy minority.

Something that has been noted is that CNN's numbers, while lower, are much more consistent from hour to hour than their competitors. It has been suggested that this is due to institutional viewership. For instance, most airports play CNN. Those televisions are always on, whether or not anyone is watching. I decided to run the numbers a bit to determine what CNN's viewership looks like if you discount its extra institutional numbers.

From calculator.net, I got the following datasets by entering the series for each network. All comparisons will be made in the order: FNC, MSNBC, CNN.




The totals really tell a story. 18,842, 13,936, and 6947. Fox gets almost three times the viewers of CNN and reaches twelve million more per evening. What we're really interested in is the standard deviation: 571, 521, and 81...clearly we weren't just imagining that CNN has less variance. Of course, we expect FNC to have higher standard deviation since it has higher numbers. We can normalize the data by dividing the standard deviation of each set by its mean. Then we get .2423, .2993, .0937. Even when normalized for its low ratings, CNN is still a major outlier.

The next step is to determine the steady viewership that must be removed from CNN to equal the normalized variance of Fox News. We can use the formula of the normalized mean to determine the inferred mean of CNN viewership.
normalized mean = std / mean
.2423 = 81.3562 / mean
mean = 81.3562 / .2423
mean = 335.766
These results show that if we remove the portion of viewership that is institutional in excess of Fox News (we aren't pretending Fox News doesn't have its own institutional viewership) then the average number of people tuning into a CNN program is 335,000. Over half a million of its viewers, the bulk of the numbers, are not home viewers. If we take the biggest time slot and fix CNN's numbers to match FNC normalized variance, we see just how crushed they're getting.

Sean Hannity - 3,281,000
Rachel Maddow - 2,733,000
Anderson Cooper - 293,391

Savage numbers. Even Maddow, who was epically trolled into unveiling Trump's impeccable tax returns to a great fanfare, beats him by about an order of magnitude. [And she's doing better than those numbers indicate because, if we normalized for all the datasets, CNN and Fox News would be lowered some more. We gave CNN a little benefit of the doubt by only comparing them to the outlet with the lower variance. If we compare them to MSNBC - a more fair comparison - CNN's average drops another 65,000.] CNN barely beats HLN in that timeslot, which by then is airing investigation reruns.

The data shows that CNN has no organic following. The bulk of its viewers are captive audiences in places like airports and hotels lobbies where they can't change the channel. Yes, people are exposed to CNN in the airport, but when they get home they turn on Fox News. CNN maintains significance not by actual reach, but because other outlets will cover them. Call it metacoverage, or secondary coverage, but it explains why CNN's influence far outweighs its reach. It is not because it is some powerhouse news organization that Americans flock to for reliable coverage, but because 96% of the media is liberal, so they grab on to CNN's headlines and ignore any conservative headlines. The liberal media like to amplify each other, but the reality is that hardly anyone is flipping the channel to CNN, and this will only get worse for them as the legacy media dies away.

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