See What Happened to CNN Ratings This Morning During Don Lemon’s Absence: Report

One of the worst-kept secrets in establishment media circles is that (leaning in to whisper) the left-wing news networks want Donald Trump back as president.

Despite the highly controversial and duplicitous attitude of the liberal media towards everything related to Trump, even the most hardened fans of CNN (there must be some somewhere) are forced to admit that he is a lightning rod.

The former president’s incredible ability to evoke the strongest emotions—whether that emotion comes from love or hate—has always led to high ratings.

While Fox News has largely applauded the post-Trump news cycle by dominating its competitors in virtually every meaningful measure of viewership, other news networks have struggled to recapture Trump’s rise, which propped up their ratings from 2016 to 2020.

CNN clearly falls into the “Trump-less network hesitant” category, and as part of a general restructuring of the company to be less overtly biased, it moved some of its most prominent faces in the hope that a change in timeslot and setting could revitalize them. not enough ratings.

Fine. Oddly enough, CNN has actually boosted its ratings through some restructuring, according to a New York Post report on Thursday — just not in the way new CEO Chris Licht likely intended.

One of the biggest names Licht touched was host Don Lemon, who moved from his primetime show to CNN’s feeble attempt to replicate the success of Fox News’s rival program Fox & Friends with its own morning show.

On CNN This Morning, Lemon joins Caitlan Collins and Poppy Harlow to discuss the news and events you may have missed while you slept.

Fox and Friends is not, at least in terms of ratings.

But in terms of entertainment value? Maybe there’s something to it, largely because Lemon keeps making unforced errors and annoying his co-hosts.

Is entertainment value mere gloating? Absolutely. But even that wasn’t enough to boost the terrible ratings that CNN This Morning was getting.

Derided as the worst morning news show in a decade, it hummed along with its low ratings, with no ointment in sight, as Lemon decided to piss off Collins, Harlow, and much of the viewing audience.

Lemon, after taking a bizarre shot at Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, claimed that Haley, 51, was “past her prime” due to her age, and if you had any trouble with Lemon’s statement, he made sure to cite his source: Fugitive search in google.

“She says that people, you know, politicians or something like that, are not in their prime. Nikki Haley is not in his prime right now. Sorry,” Lemon said on the Feb. 16 episode of CNN This Morning.

“When it is believed that a woman is in her prime – at 20, 30 and maybe 40 years old. This is not for me. If you google “when a woman is in her prime” you get 20s, 30s and 40s. I’m not saying I agree with it.”

The thought of a grown man who googles “What is the prime of a woman?” despite this, Lemon’s belittling comment (it’s worth noting that he’s 56 years old, five years older than the “out of bloom” Nikki Haley) apparently caused a lot of outrage among his peers, as well as some bigwigs backstage.

In the end, with a half-hearted and odd apology, Lemon returned to CNN This Morning on Wednesday, but not without one last potential embarrassment: CNN This Morning enjoyed the ratings spike while it was gone.

While the hit has been modest, and CNN is nowhere near enough to compete with Fox News (or even MSNBC for now), numbers are numbers, and Lemon can’t be thrilled by the possibility of him anchoring down the show’s ratings.

“Following the backlash over his remarks about presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s age, Lemon’s two-day absence from the studio appears to have actually boosted the network’s average ratings,” Dallas Lawrence, senior vice president of Samba TV, told the Post.

“The average audience in the two days following his comments was up 5% compared to the average daily audience a week earlier,” Lawrence said. “In fact, two of the three most popular days in the last eight days analyzed were days when Lemon was away.”

It’s worth noting that Nielsen, the most frequently cited source of television ratings, disputes Lawrence’s claim, according to the Post, saying that CNN This Morning’s ratings dropped during Lemon’s absence. Interestingly, Nielsen also said that female viewership dropped 20 percent during Lemon’s hiatus.

Listen, CNN This Morning is a failed show after all. Whether the show received a 5% rating increase or a 20% rating drop during Lemon’s absence is like arguing about a burr on a corpse.

At this point, it became painfully clear that CNN This Morning had only one key advantage: what would Don Lemon do today to embarrass himself and his network?

While Lemon’s weaknesses are certainly interesting, the title of the game still grabs attention on TV.

And that’s one game that CNN is playing handily – no matter what its stars do.

This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.

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