(Fox News) Several outlets have seen ratings plummet following Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris as some liberals have decided to tune out the news media and avoid updates on the president-elect.
MSNBC posted its lowest ratings in 25 years in the week following the 2024 presidential election with an average of 487,000 total viewers. CNN managed only 337,000 average total viewers to finish fifth among cable networks.
“It’s depression. Fatigue. or some are just tired of being lied to with some of the most hyperbolic dishonest rhetoric you will ever see on any network. And there are so many other options for not just liberals but all news consumers out there in the form of podcasts or huge free speech platforms like X. Those viewers may not come back this time,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha told Fox News Digital.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that liberals were turning off the news in their cars, on their phones and at home.
“I pretty much stopped on a dime,” Brandon Wilson, a California professor, told the Washington Post of his news consumption after Harris lost. The outlet reported he regularly tuned into MSNBC on SiriusXM.
Wilson was particularly frustrated by the “the finger-pointing and bashing of the Democratic Party,” in the days that followed Trump’s win, according to the outlet.
“We’re all absorbing a lot about what this win is going to mean, and the last thing I need is a lot of things that raise my blood pressure,” Wilson told the Post. “Like blaming the candidate for some obvious problems with the electorate, like misinformation and disinformation.”
It’s a far cry from the “Trump Bump” for the media after Trump’s win in 2016, which stunned the world and particularly press outlets that confidently predicted a Hillary Clinton victory. Progressives and anti-Trumpers flocked to subscribe, tune in and listen to liberal newspapers, networks and podcasts in the four years that followed.
It’s a different situation in 2024 where Trump’s victory, while still surprising to some, is far less of a shock given how tight the race was and that he’d pulled it off before.
