CNN keeps making some rather puzzling business decisions for its network. The latest of them is that Brian Stelter, who anchors "Reliable Sources," is getting even more air time with a daily version of the show on CNN +, their subscription service streaming platform set to debut in the spring. "Reliable Sources" currently airs on Sunday, while "Reliable Sources Daily" will air on weekdays.
The decision from CNN is a puzzling one considering that Stelter's ratings are less than stellar, as is the case for most of the network's shows.
"Reliable Sources" did particularly bad, though, as Fox News' Brian Flood reported last October. On October 12 Flood wrote, citing Nielsen Media Research:
CNN’s "Reliable Sources" with left-wing host Brian Stelter hit a new ratings low on Sunday in the category most coveted by advertisers.
"Reliable Sources" averaged only 90,000 viewers among the key news demographic of adults age 25-54, its smallest audience of the year among the group. The dismal performance marked only the second time Stelter’s show failed to attract 95,000 viewers in the demo.
...
"Reliable Sources" also struggled among total viewers, averaging only 726,000 to finish below 800,000 for the sixth straight week. Stelter dropped viewers from last month’s record low, but it wasn’t his smallest single-show audience of the year, as seven episodes of the struggling program have had smaller audiences in 2021.
"Reliable Sources," which claims to cover the media industry but often overlooks stories that are harmful to liberal news organizations, has now attracted fewer than 900,000 viewers in 12 of the past 13 weeks.
Stelter’s show finished September with its smallest monthly audience of the year, averaging only 738,000 viewers. The audience has dropped 59% since January and shed 18% of its August viewership.
The program also hit a yearly low among the demo last month, averaging only 130,000 viewers between ages 25-54 during the month, although that total is larger than the 90,000 who tuned in to the October 10 episode.
More recently, Stelter drew the attention of Tim Graham in a podcast for NewsBusters earlier this month, shortly after Jeff Zucker was forced to resign as the head of the network. Stelter has been a particularly ardent defender of his former boss.
As Graham wrote, previewing the podcast on February 7:
"The people who say we're lacking journalism, that we've become an all-talk channel that we've run off, and we're all opinions all the time, that Jeff Zucker led us astray. Those people aren't watching CNN. They're not watching CNN. They're watching complaints about CNN on other channels that don't know what they're talking about." We here at NewsBusters watch CNN a lot, and expose their rampant editorializing a lot.
Stelter was so angry he swore in the middle of his podcast: "this bullsh*t on Fox about CNN failing in the ratings, and that’s why Zucker was pushed out and I think that’s nuts ….yeah CNN’s at a low point right now, because were at a low point in the news cycle." [??]
The ratings for CNN overall are bad and getting worse. As Joe Concha highlighted in an opinion piece earlier this month for The Hill, "CNN's collapse is now complete." In it, he mentions how ratings fell as much as 90 percent overall from January 2021 to just one year later in January 2022.
Is CNN going to do anything about such poor ratings? As it would turn out, they're not. This is straight from Stelter, too.
"I know we're all in shock," Michael Bass said on CNN's 9am editorial call today. "You can't replace Jeff. It's not possible. There's no one else like him." So "the best thing we can do is honor his legacy and continue his mission." "Do what we've been doing every single day."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 3, 2022
The press release from CNN announcing Stelter's new show claims that the streaming service is "much-anticipated," but it's certainly not by everyone. As Matt covered earlier this month, former "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace is "irate" over how poorly it's going for him when it comes to his new gig at CNN+. Wallace had left Fox News last December.