Ryan Hall is the Future of Television
Recently, a pair of stories set an army of tongues wagging. Both dealt with the somewhat dismal prospects for cable news. First, there was the announcement that MSNBC, the political mirror image of Fox News, was being spun off by its parent company, Comcast . In addition to this, there was more grim news: CNN, which has faced stormy internal waters, had lost 34% of its audience since 2016, while competitors Fox News and MSNBC gained 5% and 35% respectively. (Despite the rosy growth numbers for MSNBC, the network nonetheless has roughly half the viewership of Fox News in 2023 - 1.5 million versus 860,00 respectively.) Be that as it may, growing viewership or not, all three national news networks are on the same sinking ship as Americans continue to "cut the cable." Since 2016, there has been a 28% decline in homes carrying the networks in cable packages. This death spiral cannot be suffered for long for an industry dependent on the ad revenue generated by cable s...