CNN's Ratings Are, Unlike Joe Biden's Bowel Movements, In the Toilet

Rumors of CNN's death have been greatly substantiated:

Joseph A. Wulfsohn @JosephWulfsohn

CNN had a disastrous October, going the entire month without any regularly scheduled program averaging 1 million viewers.

The network's total day viewership has dropped a whopping *76%* since January.

CNN ratings crash in October without any program averaging 1 million viewers
The only thing spookier than Halloween for CNN is the network's freefalling viewership.

Here's a breakdown of the averages from the three major cable news networks to illustrate how bad CNN's month was:

Fox News: 1.4M (Total Day), 2.6M (Primetime)
MSNBC: 657,000 (Total Day), 1.5M (Primetime)
CNN: 480,000 (Total Day), 733,000 (Primetime)

The only two exceptions CNN had during Oct. were the 90-min Biden town hall, which still came in third place behind Fox News and MSNBC averaging only 1.2M viewers, and the 30-min "Cuomo Prime Time" that aired immediately after with 1.1M viewers.

CNN's primetime lineup continues to collapse. "Cuomo Prime Time" lost 8% of its audience since September while "Anderson Cooper 360" and "Don Lemon Tonight" shed 16% and 17% of their audiences respectively.

Chris Cuomo, CNN's most-watched anchor, averaged 807,000 viewers.

CNN's Brian Stelter is now averaging below 700,000 w/ "Reliable Sources" hitting roughly 689,000 viewers across the five Sunday installments last month.

"New Day" fell below the *400,000* threshold, averaging 382,000 viewers, shedding more than 10% of its Sept. audience.

(End)

The collapse is real, says T. Beckett Adams.

It may be compounded by lousy programming, including disjointed moralizing monologues. CNN and MSNBC hosts and guests continue to obsess over a man who no longer rules from the White House. Perhaps it makes for bad TV to trot out Don Lemon and Chris Hayes every night to sermonize about racism and Trump’s extremism, or to divine from obscure online memes that the United States is a white nationalist country, or whatever.

...

If you're a CNN or MSNBC executive, you must be thinking of ways to turn these numbers around. True, at this time last year, there was a presidential election. There's bound to be a slump the following year. But a slump of 54% and 65%?

I can turn these numbers around.

Like that.

You know what would get ratings?

Here's my pitch, CNN:

Shark vs. Stelter.

You heard me.

Two water-filled tanks, enclosed in transparent Perspex. One tank contains a great white shark, one contains Brian Stelter in all his pale blubberous shame.

None of that "fat boy wearing a t-shirt to hide his disgrace" bullshit. No, he's naked save a barely-there Speedo (in CNN red with white piping, of course). We want to see the Real Deal Holyfield. We need to see drooping boyboob, we need to see his big floppy teacup nipples.

Tater's teats put asses in seats.

Now: Into either tank is lowered a cow carcass suspended by a high carbon-steel chain. Each carcass has been weighed exactly down to the hundredth of the ounce pre-match.

The carcasses are suddenly dropped into the water, and both the Shark and Stelter are released from their Steel Mouth Restraints. (I should have mentioned, they are both initially restrained by steel devices, like reverse bear-traps, holding open their deadly Maws of Terror.)

I think it would be dramatic to release the Mouth Restraints by explosive bolts but you'll have to check with the ASPCA. I don't know if it's ethical to do that to a shark.

Suddenly The Shark and Stelter breach the water and sink their glistening white jaws into the meat. They begin tearing and rending and shredding and ripping it and flaying it! Each with swordlike teeth, each with jaw muscles so strong that they could lift a tractor-trailer off its axel!

We bear silent, horrified witness to the raw fury of nature at its most primal, as evolution's two perfect eating machines, one a design over 100 million years old, the other honed to a sharp killer edge on a diet of Lunchables and SunnyD and furtive masturbation lubricated with tears, ravage the flesh in a frenzy of frothing blood and popping bone.

Man has always wondered: Which is the most perfect engine of lethal devouring, the great white shark, or CNN media sycophant Brian Stelter? For once and for all, we will answer this age-old imponderable.

After three minutes of blood-spraying, meat-grinding, bone-shredding carnage, the buzzer sounds and the carcasses are drawn back up from the tank.

Stelter and the Shark are forced back into Containment Pens by animal handlers protected by head-to-toe double-reinforced chainmail Anti-Stelter armor, using long pikes tipped with 4000 volt electrified lance-heads capable of stunning a Bull Tater.

Blood flows freely down their thick glistening hides as they thrash in their containment pens. Each is soothed from his bestial fury by the appropriate scientific measure. The shark is administered a dose of potent ketamine-based tranquilizer through a hypodermic-tipped spear; Brian Stelter is shown a video of Desmond is Amazing eating an eclair.

What remains of the carcasses is weighed, and that is deducted from the initial weight of the carcasses. This subtraction yields the quantity of flesh rended by the two evolutionary marvels of cyclonic consumption, these two category F5 vortexes of voracity.

Note that there will be a quantity of meat which has been torn from the carcasses but not actually consumed, as weighing the carcass before and after ravaging will measure what was stripped from it, not what was eaten. This means that intelligence and gamesmanship plays a role in this contest, for a crafty contestant will prioritize simply tearing meat from the carcass rather than eating it.

Thus we will also witness the competition between the natural intelligence and cunning of the shark, versus the pure animalistic will-to-feed of Brian Stelter.

A winner is declared, and that winner receives the Grand Prize: A live suckling pig smeared in apple butter and crumbled Chunky (TM) candy bars is dropped into the winner's tank, and we watch as it is eaten and swallowed nearly whole.

Each week, a new Shark challenger goes up against Stelter, and a new winner is declared.

The ratings would obviously be in the f***ing double digits. Maybe in the mid-thirties. It would be like MASH's final episode. (I can already see the headlines: MASH-Tater! Tater Gold!)

Ratings will be huge. At least until the format got old, but then we'd go to new variations, like Is Tater Smarter Than a Fourth Grader?

Or, Would You Rather Fuck Brian Stelter? Or a Gorilla? Like a dating show with rose ceremonies. First episode: We gather the Eligible Bachelors in an elegant mansion, 11 silverback gorillas and Brian Stelter. We immediately subject them all to a forced grooming via a firehose shower, and then we douse them all with circus-strength shampoos and deodorants so that they all smell the same. It would not be an honest competition if the gorillas had an unfair advantage over Brian Stelter as regards odor and hygiene.

We also start Brian Stelter out with two Secret Roses which he can give himself when he fails to receive a rose from the bachelorette at a rose ceremony. We don't want him kicked out in the first or second elimination. At least keep him around until the public gets to know the Bachelor Gorillas.

CNN, call me. I have ideas. Big ideas.

Most of them involve Tater. And I know he works cheap, so this is all upside.

posted by Ace at 05:10 PM

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