When the Cable News Network (CNN) launched on the evening of June 1, 1980, it was a youthful upstart business. There were just a few hundred employees, and the company was based not in New York or Los Angeles, but in a former country club building on the periphery of Atlanta, Georgia. Cable television itself was still relatively new, and the idea of a 24-hour news channel made its programming practically experimental.
The big broadcast networks and their regularly scheduled nightly newscasts had a lock on viewers and TV news. The network news desks were money machines with massive resources and handsomely paid name-brand talent.
But CNN was offering something different—a steady flow of TV news programming that was always available, that took viewers into stories in a more intimate and organic way, that harnessed modern media technology to build a product that was better suited to contemporary viewers. CNN was a bet on something cheaper, more energetic, more intense, more modern, and more flexible.
That bet paid off. CNN went on to become a fixture in American homes and a singular force in the nation's news ecosystem. It created new stars of its own, and, with its always-on programming, changed the way Americans consume and think about news, especially political news. It helped pave the way for more cable news networks, like Fox News and MSNBC, which became more explicitly partisan in their coverage and emphasis. CNN was a major power center in American politics; it has been so integral to political news consumption in the United States for so long that it's almost difficult to imagine American politics without it.
We may soon find out what that's like. As Dylan Byers noted on X, just a week after the election, the network saw the lowest ratings in the all-important 25–54 age group—what broadcasters refer to as "the demo"—since June 2000 (not counting last year's July 4th holiday). This was at a moment when political news was breaking and developing at a hectic pace, when an incoming president was putting together a new cabinet, when elections results and their meanings were still sinking in. It was a moment, in other words, when CNN should have been at the top of its game. Instead, it was warming the bench.
Viewers had tuned out. And it wasn't just CNN. After the election, MSNBC also suffered similarly low ratings in the demo. And this all comes on top of years of decline for both networks, as younger consumers cut the cord on cable TV, which is now the ancient, stagnant technology that broadcast was when CNN launched. Like the broadcast networks of the 1980s, CNN and MSNBC still throw off a lot of revenue, and can afford to pay well for top talent. Their anchors and commentators are still well known in the world of media. But it's clear that they are on their way out.
The era of cable news is over. Which is probably why Comcast, which owns MSNBC and its finance-focused sister network CNBC—as well as other cable networks like SyFy, USA, and the Golf Channel—announced this week that it's spinning off most of its linear cable news channels into a separate company. The problem for MSNBC and CNBC isn't that they aren't profitable. As CNN reports, "the channels still contribute strong profits to Comcast's bottom line." The problem is that they no longer look like growth businesses. Although executives are sure to position the move as an opportunity for a reboot, the spin-off is best understood as an acknowledgment that cable news is in decline. MSNBC's 53 percent ratings decline from October, before the election, to November just underlines the long-term trajectory.
To some extent, this is a story about ideology: CNN and MSNBC catered to left-of-center viewers who seem dejected about President Donald Trump's election to a second term. Those viewers appear to be looking away rather than gearing up to start a second run of resistance-by-obsessive-media-consumption.
But in many ways it's a story about technology and form, with upstart new media operations—which include everything from streaming services to YouTube channels to newsletters to interview podcasts—making inroads with younger, less traditionally TV-centric news consumers.
Like CNN in its infancy, these upstarts are clearly influenced by their legacy media predecessors, and in the case of the big streaming services often have direct connections to them. But they are also using new technology to break and change the form, offering political news in packages that are practically experimental.
Younger YouTube and TikTok commentators sometimes make their points in just a few seconds, with goofy graphics and wink-wink musical cues that no self-serious professional news broadcaster would ever employ. Podcasts, meanwhile, have gone the opposite direction, offering lengthy, discursive interviews that let subjects speak uninterrupted for minutes at a time and conversations that flow more naturally—a near-impossibility in the tightly paced, commercial-bounded programming blocks of cable news programming.
What comes after cable news will be much weirder, much less centralized, much less bound to the old formats and assumptions about what makes for a high-quality, professional product. And in shedding the old formats, it might even shed some of the old ideas as well, finding ways to move beyond cable's endless yelling-match squabbles and predictable partisanship.
This is a story, in other words, of competition, of new entities forming to use technology to deliver news to younger consumers in a way that better suits their interests.
If there's a counterstory to cable's decline, it's Fox News. Since the election, the conservative-leaning network's ratings are up, and Trump seems intent on building a cabinet of people pulled from its orbit. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say the Trump White House is shaping up to be the Fox News White House. But Fox, too, has seen a longer-term trend of declining viewership in recent years, as cord-cutters have abandoned cable. And as with CNN and MSNBC, the average age of its audience is quite old.
Fox is clearly poised for a short-term boomlet. But in the longer term, cable news as we know it is on its way out, and cable news' influence will continue to wane. And in its place, we'll see new power centers spring up, built on new technologies, new talent, and new format possibilities. And maybe, if we're lucky, we might even see some new ideas.
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