RUSH: I’ve also had a lot of people email me today with the news about CNN’s continuing ratings loss. Now, I’ve talked about it before. Normally, I don’t get into this in depth. It’s inside baseball. It’s media stuff. The audience doesn’t care about ratings. They watch what they watch, they listen to what they listen to, and the only time they care about ratings is if something they watch is gonna be canceled; then they find out its ratings are low and they try to do something to change it. But it’s not something that ordinary people are running around chatting to each other about.
But this is, I think, because CNN has so bastardized the concept of journalism and news that CNN is now considered to be — and, actually, not just CNN. But the whole of the mainstream media is now considered to be not journalism and not really media. It’s just a massively large and maybe leadership role of the American left. So any time people see any news that makes them feel better about it, they say, “Rush, you ought to see this! You ought…!” And the latest installment of this is a story from Breitbart.
It’s about the fact that CNN has suffered double-digit prime-time ratings losses — just in the last month, a 16% ratings loss. Now, I can… Folks, if this kind of thing had happened to this program for as long as it’s been happening to CNN, we wouldn’t be here. (sigh) Well, it’s arguable. But it would be tougher and tougher and tougher to stay here. CNN’s prime time audience is 761,000 viewers. This is a nationwide network that used to own it all. They used to be the only cable news network there was until 1997, and they owned it all.
It has 761,000 total viewers, and you divvy that up by who’s in the demographic, and the prime demographic they want is 25-54. The numbers there are embarrassing. They couldn’t even fill out half (snort!) one-twelfth the population of New York City. I mean, their national audience is about 10% of the gross total population of New York City. And yet what’s remarkable about it is that no changes are made to accommodate this, no recognition of it on the part of anybody at CNN.
They’re taking no steps to reverse this whatsoever in any way, shape, manner, or form. That 761,000 prime time viewers is a go out-of-business level of audience. And, look, if you go over the years, as Breitbart points out, look at all of the things that CNN has been dead wrong about and never acknowledged. They were part of the group that called George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic,” racist killer. Remember NBC, in that story, doctored a 911 tape, a 911 call. They edited it to make it look like Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin because he was black.
They perpetrated the “hands up, don’t shoot” myth in Ferguson. They were leading the charge and still are leading the charge about “Trump can’t win.” They led the charge Brett Kavanaugh serial rapist, and they were right up front on the “KKK Covington kids” from “KKK Covington High School.” This is just a few items. Trump colluded with Russia, they were dead wrong on all of that. And yet no apologies, no mea culpas. And it’s not just CNN. It’s the rest of the media. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC has just reached her lowest point in the Trump presidency.
So these ratings plunges on these leftist cable networks continue, and people are trying to extrapolate. “Well, does that mean that liberalism is losing influence? Does that mean…?” I don’t think that’s the case. I think the case is more psychological, and we’ve got a story coming up today with a point I made yesterday about the reason the California Democrats went after Joe Biden. We’ve got a great audio sound bite from somebody on Shannon Bream’s show last night who was asked to respond to my analysis of this.
Wait ’til you hear this. I mean, this woman is loaded for bear. She makes the point that I made that what these people really want is to get rid of all opposition, get rid of all Republicans. But they’re fed up with Bernie. Bernie’s voters are fed up with him, and this woman… In fact, let me find the sound bite, rather than… As usual, I had not intended to get into this now, but let me find it. I think it’s at the top of the page, wherever it is. (interruption) It’s 18 and 19. Could well be.
Yep! Here we go. This is Shannon Bream’s show last night on the Fox News Channel. She’s speaking with a former national campaign staff member for Crazy Bernie, Tezlyn Figaro (“Figaro,” I think she may pronounce it), and they’re talking about the presidential candidates now attacking Joe Bite Me. And to set things up, Shannon Bream introduces and plays a sound bite of me from yesterday’s program.
BREAM: I want to play a little something that Rush Limbaugh had to say about the folks going after Biden while he was not there in California. Here’s Rush’s take…
RUSH ARCHIVE: They ripped Biden a new one. … This is within the context of the California state convention, but wait ’til it starts happening campaign-wide. … They don’t want to hear about crossing the aisle, reaching across… They don’t want to hear about that. They want Republicans gone! They want Republicans ended.
RUSH: Now, to write down you, Biden was not at the California convention. He was in Iowa, might have been Ohio. But during his speech that he made (it was an LGBTQ event) he was talking about how he’s a centrist. He’s not one of these far-left people. He’s the kind of guy that can work with Republicans, the kind of guy that can get things done. And these people on the left don’t want to hear that!
They don’t want to hear about working with Republicans and getting along with ’em. So here is the answer. Shannon Bream says, “Okay. I’ve read a couple of really good pieces today that talked about the fact that when you go out there and talk to average Democrats across America, they’re not down with a lot of stuff on the left. But right now, those seem to be the loudest voices that you are hearing.”
FIGARO: I was critical of Bernie Sanders when he folded like a lawn chair, uh, when he was on the stage with Hillary Clinton when he said, “No one wants to hear about your damn emails.” Anybody can talk about somebody around the corner, but where I’m from it’s all about if you’re gonna talk about ’em to his face. Let’s see if these same candidates have the same energy that they have when it’s time for debate time. Call it out, Senator Sanders. Don’t be afraid. I would say “man up,” but he’s 77, so “grandpa” up. If he doesn’t have the guts to go against old, sweet Uncle Joe, he certainly can’t take down Trump.
RUSH: Did I not tell you this yesterday? These people are fed up, and notice — notice — that they have been simmering, the Crazy Bernie crowd, and I totally understand. In fact, when I saw Crazy Bernie do this, I thought it might be the end of him. But it also told me that he was in the tank and knew that this thing was rigged for Hillary. When Crazy Bernie made a point at one of the Saturday night Democrat debates that he was (impression) “fed up with hearing about your emails. I don’t care about your emails, Senator, and I don’t think anybody else does.”
“I don’t think we need to be worried about your email,” the missing emails, the classified emails. The audience was strangely silent. I mean, a smattering of applause other, but strangely silent. Bernie Sanders people wanted nothing to do with Hillary Clinton! They didn’t want him being nice to her. And that’s something that’s not gone away with these Bernie people. And now, Biden’s out there trying to screw up this massive move to the left, and they are fed up with it. So if you extrapolate this to what’s happening to these cable news networks, CNN, MSNBC, they’re simply…
They’re absent red meat. I mean that audience is not tuning into these networks because they have relationships with the hosts, ’cause the doesn’t matter who’s hosting. They’re tuning in because they need the red meat. They need to hear how Trump’s gone. They need to hear how Trump’s history. They need to hear how Trump’s going to jail. And when that stops happening, there’s no more reason to listen to it. If you’ve been getting a steady diet of it for two years from CNN, you’ve gotta be throwing up your hands up in total frustration.
“For crying out loud, you’ve been telling me this guy’s the biggest reprobate there, and he’s still there and the queen just threw a big dinner for him!” CNN was livid about that, and ABC was livid about that, that some developer from Queens got a gigantic royal banquet thrown for him by the queen. They hate the guy, and they’re not masking that, but their audiences are getting worn out because it’s not making anything change. So their audience is basically a bunch of activists, and the activists at these cable networks are not getting anything done.
Now, on the other side of this, it’s like Trump pointed out. He’s over in the U.K. where his approval numbers are barely above 30, because all they’ve got in the U.K. is CNN. Now, over there it’s CNN International. And I have long maintained that CNN International is providing the funding, the advertising income for CNN domestic to operate, because they can’t be making it on their own here with ratings this low. But as to whether it means that the left is fading away and dissolving or losing intensity? No, I think it means the exact opposite. I wouldn’t draw any conclusion from drowning CNN numbers and MSNBC numbers that the Democrats or the left are losing supporters or intensity whatsoever.