RUSH: Have you heard about CNN? Folks, this is inside baseball, and normally I don’t talk about ratings of other people in this business, because the vagaries are just too volatile. The whole ratings system is too volatile — and if you live by it, you can die by it. Everybody’s ratings, depending on when you take the snapshot, are gonna go up and down, and sometimes they’re gonna fluctuate greatly.

But CNN now has had enough steady erosion here that it oughta be panic time. Listen to this: “CNN’s Neilson ratings for the key important demographic which remains 25-54…” I’ve always thought that strange, though, if I may make a brief departure. The assumption is the reason why you want 25-54 in an advertising demographic is twofold. A, youth, young. B, they’re climbing. They are growing economically. They are acquiring wealth.

They are advancing professionally, and they’re in an increasingly consumerist and acquisition mode. (interruption) Well, I know. It’s tough to balance this with the fact that the American dream is dead and that there isn’t any upward mobility in the last 50 years. But we’ll work all that out here on the program today. You know that that’s not true. That’s just BS that’s put out by the Drive-Bys.

The 25 to 54 demographic, for as long as they’ve been around, has been the target demographic because that’s what advertisers want because that’s where it is theorized that the majority of disposable income is, and disposable income is what advertisers seek to separate people from. The real money is in 55-plus. By definition, the real money, the people that really have disposable income are people largely over 54.

However, the reason advertisers don’t target them is that their decisions are made. They have established buying habits. It would cost too much money to engage in advertising to change their minds. That’s why you don’t see, for example, beer advertised for anybody older than 20. They will advertise beer for people under 21, under 18, trying to forge that buying habit that will stay with that customer for a lifetime, and that’s what all advertisers try.

So especially the way the economy is now — you know, tougher and tougher for Millennials and the Obama economy — young people come out and find careers rather than just jobs. Now we’ve got full-time work being converted to part-time because of Obamacare. The whole notion that disposable income in the 25-54 bracket is rising may not be true. But those are still impressionable people, and it is viewed that the people 55-plus, if they’re buying Miller Lite, they’re not gonna be persuaded not to.

If they’re using Gillette Fusion razors, that’s what they’re gonna use. You’re not gonna convince them to go Schick. So that’s why the demographic is important. In that demographic, CNN just hit their lowest level since May of 2012, and May of 2012 was the lowest level since May of 2011 — and May of 2011 was the lowest level since May of 2010. I mean, they have been in a steady nosedive.

They are now averaging 78,000 viewers for the whole day. Just 78,000. I would think that they would have that many captive in airports around the country, who have no choice but to watch CNN. Their prime time number in the demo is 98,000. We have more than that in a city block in New York City. This is the one-year anniversary of Jeff Zucker, the “mastermind” of the Today show and MSNBC, coming in to fix this, and they continue to stick to this template.

They assume they’re not ideological.

They’re not liberals in the media. Oh, no! They are in the center.

“MSNBC? They’ve got the freak left, Fox has the freak right, and we at CNN are right in the middle. We’ve got the independents. We’ve got the genuine, really smart consumers of the news,” and that’s what they’ve been telling themselves. The fact is they’re just like anybody else in the liberal media, and they are celebrated, they are honored. Zucker and these guys are heroes for sticking with the cause even though they’re losing their shirts.

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RUSH: I’m telling you, folks, this is stunning: 98,000 viewers in prime time on a national cable news network that, by the way, used to have a monopoly on cable news. Up until 1996 or ‘7, they were it. They just sit there and lose their audience. They just keep losing it and losing it — and to those of us on the outside, it’s clear why, and apparently it is not clear to them. It just stunning.

In the old days of broadcasting and media, this wouldn’t have been allowed to get to this degree. There would have been heads rolled and massive changes years ago. They would not even be permitting this, and there certainly wouldn’t be anybody remaining at that place called a star, and there wouldn’t be an exec that was considered at the top of his game. It’s just… The corruption of everything, achievement-wise, that the left touches, to me is just remarkable.

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RUSH: Now, in addition to the numbers at CNN, I must tell you, as a highly trained broadcast specialist, and aside from five years working at a professional baseball team, this is all I’ve ever done. I mean, this is my business and my life. I’m sitting here in total stunned dismay, 98,000, average prime time for a national cable news network that used to have a monopoly. It’s just almost indescribable, in a professional sense, how it survives. And how no heads roll.

I know why. I know exactly why. It is the primacy of the ideology. The ideology must be protected at all costs. Liberalism can never be seen as a failure. Liberalism can never be seen as a drag financially. Liberalism can never be seen in a negative light. And so as far as CNN’s concerned, there’s nothing wrong. This news gets reported and that’s it, as far as it goes. They don’t react to it. They don’t act on it, and they’ll be used by Time Warner as a loss leader, and the losses that they incur will be ate up elsewhere in the company.

Now, in addition to that, they’re laying people off left and right. We just learned that 40 senior journalists have been laid off at CNN, including a pregnant producer who is due to give birth I think to twins in two weeks. It may not be twins, but the birth is in two weeks. They’ve actually been laying people off since November. So it’s stunning, to me, it truly is.