I normally don’t pay much attention to next day ratings news for major coverage stories, mainly because the results are usually the same every time. Either CNN or FNC is #1 (depending on the story and how it happened to unfold CNN or FNC could come out on top though usually it would be FNC), if FNC #1 then CNN #2 and MSNBC #3 or, if it had a really bad day, #4. This has pretty much how things have unfolded for as long as I’ve been blogging.
Last night, however, things didn’t unfold as usual and that merits notation. FNC was #1 of course by a wide margin but MSNBC came in 2nd in Total Viewers and the Demo and HLN came in 3rd and CNN wound up in 4th. TVNewser has the numbers…
Let’s repeat that for emphasis. CNN came in 4th. On an election night. Granted, it was not that big an election night by most of our standards but the networks treated it like a big election night and this included CNN.
A lot of people are going to be doing some head scratching as to why CNN failed to deliver so badly last night. I don’t think this was so much an MSNBC victory as it was a CNN defeat. CNN’s numbers were under a million. I don’t have the numbers for the general election last year but I would wager CNN was a lot closer percentage wise to FNC than it was last night. So something happened to cause CNN to crater but MSNBC did not suffer a similar cratering. Was it the lack of real election news since the networks were really just covering a handful of races? Or was that just one part of the story?
I think it will be overhyped by some that this is another nail in Jon Klein’s coffin but I’m not so sure this really qualifies. It looks bad, sure. But how substantial the damage really was depends greatly on the reason for the tune out. For example, if people tuned out because they were expecting news and weren’t getting it, that would actually be an example of CNN’s branding working against itself where if there isn’t news, there aren’t eyeballs. CNN’d numbers tend to surge when there’s breaking news and big news. When there’s not a lot of news it tends to flatline in a specfic range it won’t trend out of. Since CNN likes its brand (most of the time) this would not necessarily be viewed internally as a problem needing fixing. I think it would be more concerned if it came in 4th in a breaking news story or big news story than it would be in a hype over substance story like last night. If this isn’t already a talking point for the network to finesse the 4th place finish, it may soon be.
Problem is CNN hyped this event just like everyone else so it’s now a victim of an overly high expectations game. It raised its own bar and then failed to clear it. So it’s going to take a somewhat self-inflicted beating now.
