One TV political commentator compared this year's Republican primary cycle to a sportscaster trying to fill airtime during a 30-point blowout in football.
Despite narrowing poll distance between front-runner Donald Trump and challenger Nikki Haley entering Tuesday's Republican New Hampshire primary, voters largely foresee an inevitable rematch between Trump and incumbent President Joseph Biden in November.
Consequentially, there's been no "Trump Bump" to the TV news audience ... and little election-year spike of any kind, really.
Fox News, MSNBC and CNN collectively generated a total prime-time audience of around 4.27 million viewers a week ago (Jan. 15) for the Iowa caucus, roughly half the 8.5 million averaged by the same networks in Iowa back in February 2020 (which featured eventual president-elect Biden finishing in fourth place).
The collective linear performance of the big three cable news networks from 8 p.m. - 11 p.m. was even worse in the key 25-54 demographic, where CNN averaged only 194,000 viewers.
Sure, the Iowa caucus aired on a night that featured not only an NFL Wild Card playoff game on ESPN, but also the strike-delayed Primetime Emmys telecast.
But that doesn't mean Tuesday night's NFL-free programming schedule will provide any relief for Fox, MSNBC and CNN.
Reporting from the DoubleTree in downtown Manchester, N.H. Sunday, news site Semefor found the place -- typically packed during primary season with reporters paying up to seven times the normal room rate -- fairly empty.
Back in 2016, then CBS President Les Moonves famously quipped to investors that wall-to-wall coverage of candidate Trump's campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." Ratings and advertising dollars flooded into broadcast and cable news networks, as well as digital news platforms.
But speaking from Davos last week, Washington Post CEO Will Lewis said he doubted another "Trump bump" would emerge for the 2024 election cycle. “I’m not convinced that will be the case,” he said, noting that digital news platforms will need to look elsewhere for news subscribers this year.
The Post drew a personal record 114 million unique users in November 2020, and 111 million in January 2021, but it hasn't come close to those kinds of audience numbers since that time.
