See also: CNBC's $10 million a year man Shep Smith is out after two years

Big news this week in the world of left-wing mainstream cable news.  It almost gives one hope that the fake news house of cards that has ruled the roost since 2016 or earlier may be coming to a well deserved end.

While the rest of the MSM won't admit and scarcely report it, the future of fake news leader CNN is bleak at best and possibly terminal.  Its leader during the Trump era of pioneering woke news, Jeff Zucker, was offed earlier this year.  His successor, leftist programmer Chris Licht, has produced nothing but failures.  These are now reaching critical mass as the channel's prime-time hour at 9 P.M. lacks a host while ratings for CNN's new nightly show from 10 P.M. to 12 A.M. are shockingly low, possibly the worst in the channel's entire history.  In addition, the move of leftist prime time host Don Lemon to co-hosting the channel's morning show is proving to be another looming disaster.

The two most recent cable television ratings reports, by Nielsen Media Research, for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week are astonishing.  On Wednesday, for instance, CNN's 11 P.M. hour, CNN Tonight, hosted by Alysin Camerota and Laura Coates, had only 260,000 total viewers.  At the same time, Gutfeld! on Fox News had almost ten times as many viewers — 2.5 million.  In the advertiser-preferred demographic, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, CNN had only 44,000 viewers versus Fox News Channel's 417,000.  The number of total viewers CNN had is approximately 0.1% of the U.S. population.

These ratings are not anomalies but are reflective of most of the day, when Fox News had more than twice as many viewers overall as CNN and MSNBC combined.

A veteran industry insider's comment to me yesterday nailed it (emphasis added):

CNN's ratings are indeed in free fall across the entire network, and [CEO Chris] Licht has done absolutely nothing to clean up a toxic waste dump after 7 months in the job other than to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. CNN is closer to low-rated Newsmax [in the ratings] at this point than the rest of cable news. Their brand has been destroyed.

Earlier this year, CNN's ownership shifted to a new corporate entity, Warner Bros. Discovery.  They installed veteran broadcast television executive Chris Licht to improve CNN's performance.  So far, he has been King Midas in Reverse.  How much longer Licht and CNN's stable of failed on-air talent can avoid the corporate chopping block is an open question.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who has covered national politics, the politics and economics of health care, popular culture, and media for over five decades.  His web page with links to his work is http://peter.media.  Peter's extensive American Thinker archive: http://tinyurl.com/pcathinker.  Follow Peter on Twitter @pchowka.