News ratings, traffic plummet post-Trump

Former President Trump’s exit from the White House coincided with a slump in ratings for cable news channels and digital news sites, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Data from media tracking firm ComScore as well as the Nielsen company indicated drops in traffic across websites for the Post, which lost roughly one-fourth of its monthly web traffic, as well as The New York Times, which lost roughly 17 percent of its traffic over January and February.

In the cable news ratings wars, CNN lost nearly 50 percent of its prime-time audience over the first few months of 2021, according to the Post, while MSNBC lost more than a fourth and Fox News lost just 6 percent, causing CNN to lose its briefly-won ratings dominance for the month of January.

The ratings drop followed a prediction from CNN President Jeff Zucker, who in 2019 told Vanity Fair that “anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away.”

“[A]t the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump,” he added at the time.

The former president himself also predicted a slump for cable news upon his exit from the public scene back in 2017, when he told The New York Times: “Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there, because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”