In Pathetic Bid to Boost Ratings, CNN Goes Full Demagogue Against Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson noted some time ago: With Trump gone, CNN and MSNBC are lacking a hate object, and experiencing low ratings due to this.

So guess what? You're now the designated hate object.

And Tucker Carlson is the new Hate Object.

CNN is the Deplatforming Network. All of their "journalism" is just team-ups with Media Matters and Sleeping Giants to pressure social media companies and advertisers to deplatform/boycott conservative voices.

As CNN's Brian Stelter flounders in the ratings next to Fox News' Tucker Carlson, he's brought out the serious accusations against the Fox host: that Carlson is working "in cahoots" with notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. As CNN’s chief media critic, Stelter regularly focuses his attention on Carlson, who he’s branded an icon of "white male rage and resentment," a "conspiracy theorist," and "the new Donald Trump."

He gives the game away right there. He literally says it: We need a new Donald Trump, and we've decided that Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump.

Audiences don't seem to care, however, and 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' pulled in around 2.8 million viewers every night in June, compared to the 786,000 who tuned in to Stelter's 'Reliable Sources', which has lost viewers every month since President Joe Biden took office. Though the two host shows at different times, they are both seen as representatives of their networks’ political stances.

Carlson, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the object of Stelter's ire again on Sunday night. The CNN host played a clip of Carlson and Jones tackling similar subjects -- the government allegedly monitoring their communications, risks associated with vaccines, alleged FBI involvement in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill -- before asking fellow CNN journalist Oliver Darcy if "Tucker Carlson is the new Alex Jones?"

Note well that the comparison to Alex Jones is not coincidental. CNN's first big censorship win was getting Alex Jones deplatformed. By claiming Tucker Carlson is the new Alex Jones (and also, the new Donald Trump), they are explicitly calling for him to be deplatformed.

Some of us warned that the Alex Jones deplatforming was just the proof-of-concept run for the new CNN-Media Matters-Tech Monopoly censorship regime. "Respectable" conservatives of course ignored us, and ignorantly dismissed this warning.

They were just too busy sucking off their leftwing Twitter palz to get their faces covered in that sweet, sweet leftwing respectability.

Astonishingly enough, it turns out when you let the left censor people, the left keeps censoring people.

But let's keep giving money to the Conservative, Inc. junior partners in censorship. They really care about our rights.

CNN really needs the a new hate object: their ratings have completely collapsed.

CNN's prime-time ratings have fallen by 68%.

Fox also lost 50%. MSNBC lost 48%.

In the key demo the year-over-year declines in prime time were more dramatic, with CNN slipping a staggering 68% compared to the second quarter of 2020. Fox News saw a 50% drop compared to one year ago, and MSNB'’s decline was just slightly less, at 48%.

Experts say CNN and MSNBC are suffering a massive loss of credibility, if you can believe that. (I'd note that Fox has also lost a lot of credibility with conservatives.)

The second quarter of 2021 saw viewers ditch CNN and MSNBC in droves as experts wonder if the liberal networks can ever recover from a "serious credibility problem" they created by relying on former President Donald Trump for success while ignoring internal gaffes and scandals.

"CNN and MSNBC were one-trick ponies, and that trick was bashing Trump," Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.

"Now that Trump no longer is president, they have tried to keep up the mania, but it's hard. The audience has disappeared because it never was loyal to CNN and MSNBC hosts, it was loyal to Trump hatred," Jacobson added. "It's not hard to imagine executives at CNN and MSNBC saying nightly prayers that Trump runs for president in 2024."

...

Fox News contributor Joe Concha thinks a significant credibility crisis at CNN and MSNBC is going to keep viewers vanishing.

"Q3 will be even worse in looking at the trends for both networks, if that's possible. The numbers are where they are because of two things: Their myopic ratings hook, Donald Trump, isn't around anymore. But more importantly, these networks have a serious credibility problem," Concha said, noting that left-wing stars from each network have recently generated negative headlines but went unpunished.

...

Political satirist and radio host Tim Young agreed that “there’s no coming back” for CNN and MSNBC.

"They based their entire programming lineup on going after the bogeyman they created in Trump, and now that he’s gone, they have nothing to instill the clickbait-like fear from false stories about him to capture their viewers’ attention," Young told Fox News.

The American news media ranks last among 46 countries, as far as public trust in their media.

The United States ranks last among 46 countries when it comes to public trust in the media, according to a report published Tuesday.

The survey, which was conducted in Jan. and Feb. with approximately 92,000 respondents, found that only 29% of those in the U.S. said they could trust most news most of the time, while Finland held the highest level of trust in the media at 65%. The study was commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and conducted by YouGov.

The survey also found that trust in the media improved in nearly every country surveyed, but not in the U.S., where the level of trust remained largely flat from the previous year.

...

Journalist Glenn Greenwald described the findings in the report as "unsurprising." "Most amazing is that the corporate sector of the US media is failing in every respect: financially, culturally, collapsing trust. Any other industry failing like this would engage in self-critique, asking why. They never do," he wrote.

Other critics on social media argued that the media needed to "take an opportunity for introspection," and realize that it was not a matter of perception from the public, while some questioned why anyone would be surprised by the data.

posted by Ace at 12:15 PM

| Access Comments