CNN holds meeting on how to cover four more years of Trump as ratings tank

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

CNN’s waning viewership may see a shift in how the media company covers President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.

Left-leaning media organizations are trying to figure out how to navigate the next four years while recognizing that he won both the popular and electoral vote this time around. This means people are less likely to tolerate non-stop Trump bashing than they were in 2016.

CNN is among the groups attempting to shift their focus going forward, according to an insider at Puck News who reported on an all-hands call featuring CNN Chairman and C.E.O. Mark Thompson.

According to the report, Thompson implied that the outlet’s previous Trump obsession was not a viable strategy going forward.

“Audiences for CNN and MSNBC were already declining before the election; since then, they’ve fallen off a cliff. The day before CNN’s all-hands, exactly one week after the election, both networks drew some of their smallest audiences on record,” Puck explained.

“In the Wednesday staff meeting, Thompson acknowledged that it was all well and good to cover Trump’s cabinet appointments, but he did not want CNN to go wall-to-wall on the daily Trump drama for the next four years, as the network mostly had under Zucker during the president-elect’s first administration,” the report continued.

While part of the audience falloff could be attributed to changes in how Americans consume their daily news, it could also be an indicator that people are just “sick of the way the media covers politics.”

As for the future of CNN’s coverage, Thompson appears to see a way forward with original programming rather than talking head-laden coverage:

Thompson pointed to two examples that helped articulate a path forward: John King’s “All Over the Map” series, an election-season voter-interview feature from the battleground states—effectively a “man on the street” subgenre, only with better production values and often “in the home”—and Donie O’Sullivan’s slickly produced packages from the front lines of MAGA America featuring, as Thompson put it, the “people we don’t normally hear on CNN.” (Thompson singled out an interview in which a January 6 rioter expressed confidence that he’d be pardoned by Trump.) In other words, more reporting from the field, less pontificating from the studio.

It remains to be seen if a shift in the outlet’s strategy will be able to bring back viewers who have abandoned the organization, or if it’s simply prolonging the inevitable.