Cable News Is Over
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
Viewers had tuned out. And it wasn’t just CNN. After the election, MSNBC also suffered similarly low ratings in the d
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