CNN, that esteemed fact-checker to the world's comedians and employer of The Biggest Losers - on Jeopardy, has themselves fallen into last place among cable news outlets. How's that head pat working out for you?
The official monthly numbers will be finalized at 4 p.m. Monday and will include results from Friday. CNN executives conceded that will not change the competitive standing for the month. CNN will still be last in prime time.
That means CNN’s programs were behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but even its own sister network HLN (formerly Headline News.) Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. That was the first time CNN had finished that poorly with its prime-time shows.
Surprised? I'm not. Fox News had a ready audience, looking for a center-right network to fill the void left by national news outlets' - including CNN - inexorable and consistent shift to the left, and on the left MSNBC has marketed themselves as the place where the left can get their red meat for the day. Who's left to watch CNN?
What should CNN do to regain market share? Well, in golf the best place to play from is the middle of the fairway. They should hit their drives a heck of a lot straighter. Just because a story helps conservatives doesn't mean it's not a story, the President's opinion notwithstanding.
10/27/09 0920: Don Surber:
The sneaky opinion — Anderson Cooper’s sneering contempt for conservative protesters — is what people don’t like. Cooper and company try to be stealth[y] but they come of[f] as snide and fake, as if they are trying to hide who they really are.
That too. The alphabet soup of left-leaning media, of which CNN is a member, consider themselves centrist, and want to be seen that way, even as they use name-calling and derision to refer to legitimate conservatives, as if no conservative politics can even be considered legitimate.
More: Maybe now is not the time to let Joy Behar vent her leftist spleen.
10/27/09 1025: Okay, here's a good example. CNN polls on Cap & Trade and finds 60% support. But the question itself is misleading, or rather, presents the benign facade that Cap & Trade supporters want to be seen. Let's have a look:
16. Under a proposal called "cap and trade," the federal government would limit the amount of greenhouse gases that companies could produce in their factories or power plants. If companies exceeded those limits, they would either pay a fine or pay money to other companies that produced smaller amounts of greenhouse gases. Would you favor or oppose this proposal?
What do you think would be the support would be if they added a sentence? "These costs would be passed on to you, the consumer, as higher energy costs and higher prices,and economically we would see slower growth and job losses." Can't have the people getting all the information, can we?
