-By Warner Todd Huston
Despite the much ballyhooed tinkering by chief Jeff Zucker to halt CNN’s ratings decline, the cable news network racked up its third-lowest month on record for January. Things were so bad that even repeats of the reality show Shark Tank airing on CNBC beat CNN in the ratings.
This January, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, the nation’s oldest financial cable news network, began airing repeats of the ABC reality show Shark Tank, where applicants vie for funding from a panel of venture capitalists. CNBC’s reruns topped every show on CNN as well as every show but The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.
The reruns of the reality/game show came in at number 6 in the ratings race behind four Fox News shows, The O’Reilly Factor, The Five, The Kelly File and Special Report With Bret Baier, with Maddow’s show on MSNBC coming it at fifth place. But Shark Tank swamped every single CNN show on the schedule.
During the 8PM to 11PM shifts neither Fox nor MSNBC lost much in their key demographic ratings, but CNN was down 35 percent over last month.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, “CNN continues to struggle with New Day and Crossfire, which hit new lows in January — one factor contributing to its total day demo haul (98,000 viewers) slipping below HLN (101,000). Among total viewers (317,000), CNN’s monthly haul was its third-lowest since 1991.”
Only days ago on January 27, CNN chief Jeff Zucker was defending his efforts to bring CNN back from ratings death during his keynote address to the RealScreen Summit.
In particular Zucker defiantly defended his network’s coverage of the Justin Bieber story saying, “No news organization is perfect, and CNN is not always perfect. But I think we had this right. We did cover the Bieber story, and I’m not going to apologize for what we did.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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