Fake Through and Through

Ted Turner invented the 24 hour cable news business when he put CNN on the air in 1980.

At one time CNN's reach and its brand were so strong that I thought it was impregnable to any competitors.

Today it is hard to believe that CNN was such a dominant force at one time.

Here are the  Cable TV viewership averages for the 2018 calendar year.

CNN is only drawing about 40% of the viewers that Fox News Channel does and getting only half of the audience that MSNBC is receiving.

Cable channels such as the Hallmark Channel, the History Channel and Investigation Discovery are drawing more viewers than CNN.

More telling are the ratings for last night's State of the Union address by President Trump. CNN only had about one-third of the viewers that FNC had. Bear in mind this is the cable channel that at one time completely owned cable news. It had no competition.

What happened?

Consider CNN's reporting on President Trump's State of the Union address last night.

Here is the headline from its website reporting on its own CNN poll that found 76% of viewers of the speech reacted positively to the speech (59% strongly positive).

If you only saw the headline you only saw the word "partisan". You did not see anything about the 76% approval of the speech.

Of course, all State of the Union addresses typically have more supporters of the President tuning in than detractors. That is not news. Why make that the headline of the story?

If you dig deeper into the polling on previous SOTU speeches the reporting of CNN looks even more suspect.

Here are the approval scores going back to 2017 for the SOTU addresses as detailed in the background in the actual CNN poll.

Interestingly, there was only one time in the seven SOTU speeches that Barack Obama gave that he received higher "very positive" scores than Trump did last night. And that was when Obama had only been in office one month.

Was this reported anywhere by CNN?

Could they have not also made this the headline?

Trump SOTU most positively received in a decade

Contrast the CNN headline with how a couple of other news sites headlined the same story about the CNN poll.

Real Clear Politics

The Hill

Why does President Trump refer to CNN as "fake news"?

Why has CNN lost so many viewers?

CNN quite simply no longer seems to think that it is running a news operation.

Its only objective seems to be to make Donald Trump look as bad as it can.

There is no better example than its reporting of the results of its own poll last night.

CNN simply could not bring itself to report the story straight. To do so would mean that it would have to write a positive headline regarding Donald Trump.

That simply is not acceptable news to the Cable News Network.

The problem that CNN has is that it has lost the conservative audience to FNC. It has lost the liberal audience to MSNBC. The only hope it has for ratings is to really be "the most trusted source in news". That is what they say they are. The reality is that it is not true and viewers know it is not true.

People don't want fake news. They also can see through fake slogans.

CNN will continue to struggle until they realize that fake does not sell.