Media Research Center, the right-leaning media watchdog, was monitoring CNN show “Reliable Sources” when media reporter Oliver Darcy was pitched a question: Is the media out of the touch with the public?
“If you travel the country,” Darcy replied to host Brian Stelter, “people are not really living in the same bubble it seems that most of the media is messaging toward.”
That is certainly a fair-minded observation, especially from liberal CNN, and it sort of mirrors the admission some left-wing journalists made after they missed Donald Trump’s surprise win over Hillary Clinton. Some of those observations, after closer scrutiny, were actually haughty comments about Red State voters.
Jeff Jarvis, a far-left journalism professor, arrogantly observed after Trump's win that the national media overlooked the "angry white men (and women)" who "bred Trumpism."
Regarding the public moving on from COVID-19 stories, Darcy made a similar observation this week. “If we're not messaging toward the general population,” he complained, “they're just ignoring everything and living their lives, and we're not really getting the information they need to them.”
People are living their lives? Without relying on CNN?
Curtis Houck of the Media research Center says the Left talks to flyover America like they're tapping on the glass at the zoo. The zoo animals, he says, are us.
“I genuinely believe, for some of these people, that their skulls are so thick, their bubbles are so thick,” he observes, “that they're not able to understand how disconnected and out of touch they are.”
Darcy's plea about media-approved information also mirrors advice four years ago from Jarvis, the media professor. The national media, Jarvis said at the time, needs to understand the views of Trump voters, gain their trust, and then "inform their worldviews."
CNN is not informing much of the public: It started 2022 after losing 90% of its audience compared to 2021.
Prediction: CNN will keep bleeding viewers
CNN's dramatic loss of viewers, first reported by The Daily Beast, comes from Nielsen ratings that looked at its nightly primetime shows and key audience demographics. The cable news network pulled in 705,000 primetime viewers last week after 4.2 million watched at the same time last year.
CNN's slide from its trail-blazing years under founder Ted Turner has not gone unnoticed by MRC, either. The media watchdog, which has been documenting left-wing media bias for three decades, is now watching CNN lose millions of viewers after Donald Trump left office.
"I don't think they're going to change," MRC research director Scott Whitlock says. "They're too invested in being this far Left, and so I think they're just going to go further and further down."
This story has been updated with comments from Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center.
