'Get woke, go broke' has cut many a corporate profit. But for CNN's top newsman, Jake Tapper, the specter of 75% of his audience tuning out is starting to look literal.
According to Fox News:
CNN’s "The Lead with Jake Tapper" has shed a staggering 75% of its audience since the liberal network experienced a January spike in viewers.
Tapper’s program averaged 2.8 million viewers in January but settled for only 706,000 in the 4 p.m. ET timeslot from May 31 through June 23, losing three-quarters of its audience in the process. Tapper’s second-quarter viewership is down 49% compared to the first quarter.
The audience keeps moving and moving away from him. Which must be humiliating for Jake, given that one of his CNN rivals, Brian Stelter, recently lost a mere 72% of his audience. Ted Koppel has been grossing out since 2018 and all that Stelter ever does is go lower.
But Jake has lost more, even though Jake is better-known and doesn't have some of Stelter's "disadvantages." Stelter in fact is one of the yuckiest guys on the air, not just less photogenic than Jake, but prone to doing gross stuff, such as posing pantless as if he were on the toilet for viewers' edification. CNN in general is a laggard's laggard, lagging even the laggards in lagging market. But nobody seems to have as many lost viewers as Jake.
What does that collapse coincide with: Likely a recent poll that came out showing that Americans trust their media more than anyone.
According to Joe Concha, writing in
The Hill:
The U.S. media is the least trustworthy in the world, according to a comprehensive new Reuters Institute survey encompassing 46 countries.
Yes, you read that right. The country with among the most resources in this arena – human, technical and otherwise – finished dead last. Finland ranked the highest, with a 65 percent trust rating. In Kenya, the trust rating clocked in at 61 percent.
But here in the U.S.A., the home of global media giants including the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, we’re trusted by a whopping 29 percent of those reading and watching.
Is anyone really surprised? Because in looking at polls over the past few years (even pre-Donald Trump) we’ve been trending in this dubious direction for some time.
Trust has been broken. And Tapper is right there out front. Once upon a time, Jake was the most trusted name in news, the guy who would ask a tough question when the other reporters cowered.
He's stopped that stuff as he's risen in the ranks and
gotten awards and sought to make himself Defender of the Establishment, defending the ruling Democrats everywhere they do, no matter how many outrageous things they do and say, and of course, criticizing President Trump no matter what he did or does now.
He started going downhill when he was caught involved with the Clinton Foundation. That was a sea change and his reputation has only gotten worse. He politicked in the case of Rep. Conor Lamb, for one, urging a potential rival to run for election someplace else. He defended the tech lords of Twitter when they shut down the New York Post for its inconvenient scoops on Hunter Biden, for one, effectively throwing First Amendment solidarity over the side and becoming a
corporate shill. He was last seen trying to criticize Chris Cuomo who had some severe conflicts of interest around his embattled brother, New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo, yet his
own involvement with the Clintons went unremarked upon.
Had he stayed Mr. Objective, he might not have gotten his most lucrative news spots or all those awards. But he would remain respected instead of despised and distrusted, which is what we see in those poll numbers cited by Concha. One makes one's decisions, and Tapper sold his audience out.
Now they're not bothering with him, and he's losing money and audience for his company. How long should that go on? How long until Tapper gets to zero. In the real corporate world this kind of underperformance is not tolerated, and those who bring such numbers to the corporate mothership are soon out on their ears. With Tapper, we don't know, all we know is that he's living off someone's money or subsidy in the company since he's not producing anything of value.
That's a sorry picture. All because Jake went both corporate and woke --- and got broke. He can't be gone soon enough.
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