End of Cable News
End of Cable News
A long-term trend for Americans to cancel their cable news subscriptions accelerated in the latest report, as a whopping 7% of traditional cable subscribers just cut the cord and saved on the fees. For this first quarter of 2023, an astounding total of 2.3 million customers turned off their subscriptions.
This is a downward spiral of the last decade, but spinning very fast now. In 2016, there were cable news subscriptions in 70% of American homes. Today that has fallen to less than 40%.
The choice made by the overpaid consultants to Ron DeSantis to use Twitter for the campaign launch of his presidential candidacy reflected this decline in influence of the rival cable platforms. It was a spectacular technological failure, like one of Elon Musk's rockets imploding soon after takeoff.
Some might observe that the real audience for DeSantis was Musk himself, just as newly announced rival Sen. Tim Scott had billionaire Larry Ellison at his campaign launch. Both of these candidacies will last only until their funding by globalist mega-donors dries up.
Neither of those rivals selected cable news to announce their runs. Neither did Trump when he announced last November, but he did hold a highly successful town hall on CNN that broke viewership records for it.
CNN's audience for the Trump event was an impressive 3.3 million viewers, but that is still far lower than the audiences for similar events in 2015. By comparison, the first Republican presidential debate in August 2015, on Fox News, drew 24 million viewers.
Fox News anchors then, like Chris Wallace, felt they had enough influence to sway who would win the Republican nomination, as early in the primary it was hostile to Trump. But with the declining cable subscriptions, Fox News' overpayment of nearly a billion dollars to settle one of many lawsuits against it, and its censoring of Tucker Carlson signal less influence today.
As reported by Breitbart, inflated carriage fees based on hefty subscriber charges are what fuel the revenue for cable news, not advertising based on viewership. As with most subsidies, the carriage fee overpayments will not last forever at the public's expense, and apparently the end is coming sooner than the cable executives hoped.
So CNN has been looking for alternative sources of revenue for its programming that few people want to watch, and even less want to pay for. It launched a CNN+ streaming service earlier this year which failed so badly that it was canceled withing a month.
The result may be to increase the influence of the mega-donors, such as Musk potentially for DeSantis, and Ellison for Scott. These and nearly all other billionaires are globalists, who oppose not only Trump but also other grassroots candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the Democratic side.
This also means that few will actually be watching any Republican primary debates later this year, as scheduled to begin in August 2023. Polling suggests that most people have already made up their mind about for whom they will be voting for president anyway.
