Eric Trump Trolls CNN With Poor TV Ratings Report, While FOX News Dominates Viewership
Eric Trump continued President Donald Trump's legacy of trashing CNN and monitoring television ratings. On Monday, he called CNN "totally irrelevant" for falling well behind Fox News in overall viewership for February.
"Congratulations @FoxNews: Fox has 15 of the top 20 shows with @SeanHannity and @TuckerCarlson leading the pack at 1st and 2nd respectively," the younger Trump tweeted. "CNN has become totally irrelevant, down 19% from last year with only 1 show in the Top 25 (#24th)."
Indeed, none of CNN's programs cracked the top 20 most watched news shows, according to an Adweek report citing Nielsen Media's February report.
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The most watched CNN show in February was Anderson Cooper 360 coming in at 24 with 1.07 million viewers, or about a third of the top performing shows: Hannity, with 3.33 million viewers and Tucker Carlson Tonight, with 3.14 million.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow came in third with 2.87 million viewers.
CNN performed better when it came to the 25-52 age demographic—a base advertisers typically look to target—though Fox News remained dominant in that category as well. Cooper's show came in tenth with 386,000 viewers while Sean Hannity picked up 711,000 viewers, good for first place, followed by Tucker Carlson Tonight with 650,000. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell and All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC finished eighth and ninth, respectively, in both overall viewership (2.1 million and 1.9 million) and the 25-52 demographic (457,000 and 411,000).
Maddow decidedly improved her numbers from last February, according to Adweek, when Maddow ranked seventh with 2.23 million overall viewers and sixth among 25 to 52 year olds. She recorded 641,000 such viewers this past February.
CNN fared worse, year-over-year. Cooper's show dropped two spots from eighth in the 25-52 age range while Erin Burnett's Outfront dropped from 10th in 2017 to 13th in 2018. Among overall viewers for this February, Burnett's show ranked 28th with 986,000.
Lambasting CNN has become a family affair for the Trumps. The president and his sons Eric and Donald Jr., have all repeatedly labeled the network "fake news."
On February 1, the president touted Fox News' viewership during his first State of the Union speech, though he falsely stated the network had 11.7 million viewers when it was a slightly more modest 11.5 million. Trump also falsely claimed that his was the most watched such address, though both presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had more viewers tune into their State of the Union speeches.