WORLD NEWS FOR MONTENEGRO DIASPORA
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SOURCE: VOA – AUTHOR: M.J. GDNUS
As a Democrat who immersed himself in political news during the presidential campaign, Ziad Aunallah has much in common with many Americans in the post-election period. He has stopped following what is happening.
“People are mentally exhausted,” says Aunullah, 45, of San Diego. “Everyone knows what is coming, and we are just taking some time off.”
Television ratings data — and now a new poll by the AP and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) — clearly illustrate the phenomenon. According to the poll, about two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit their news coverage of government and politics because they are overwhelmed.
Smaller percentages of Americans limit their coverage of conflicts in other parts of the world, the economy or climate change, the poll found.
CNN and MSNBC election coverage took up too much of Sam Goode’s time before the election, says the 47-year-old electrician from Lincoln, Nebraska.
“The last thing I want to watch right now is the period between two administrations,” says the Democrat, who is not a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump.
Democrats are pulling back more than Republicans
The poll, conducted in early December, found that about seven in 10 Democrats say they will watch less political news. The percentage is not as high for Republicans, who have reason to celebrate Trump’s victory. However, about six in 10 Republicans say they also felt the need to take a break, and the percentage is similar for independents.
The differences are much greater for TV networks that are preoccupied with political news.
After election night through Dec. 13, MSNBC’s primetime ratings averaged 620,000, down 54% from the campaign period this year, Nielsen said. During the same period, CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers fell 45%.
Fox News, the favorite news network of Trump supporters, saw its post-election average of 2.68 million viewers rise 13%, Nielsen said. After the election, 72% of people who watched one of the three cable networks in the evening watched Fox News, compared with 53% before Election Day.
Rating declines for networks that favor the losing candidate are not new. MSNBC struggled similarly after Trump was elected in 2016. Fox did the same in 2020, although the situation was a bit more complicated there — many of its viewers were outraged after the network was among the first to announce on election night that Democratic candidate Joe Biden had won Arizona, and they began looking for alternatives.
MSNBC also struggled with viewer anger after morning show hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited Trump shortly after his election victory on November 8. While the show’s ratings have fallen 35% since Election Day, that’s a smaller drop than the network’s primetime ratings.
CNN points out that while it has struggled with TV ratings, its streaming and digital ratings have held steady.
Will interest be stronger once Trump takes office?
MSNBC can perhaps find solace in the past. In previous years, network ratings would rebound when the depression following an election defeat eased.
“You don’t have a choice. Whether you want to hear it or not, it’s happening. “If you care about your country, you have no choice but to pay attention,” Aunallah says of his renewed interest in political news.
But it may not be that simple. MSNBC’s decline is even greater than it was in 2016; and there’s also the question of whether Trump’s opponents will want to be as engaged as they were during his first term. People are also increasingly canceling cable subscriptions, although MSNBC believes it has stemmed that trend.
MSNBC is also facing corporate changes, as parent company Comcast announced last month that the network would become part of a new company, giving it new management and separating it from NBC News.
Polls show that Americans generally want public figures to talk less about politics. After an election season that saw the voices of celebrities like Taylor Swift take center stage, the survey found that Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of celebrities, big companies and professional athletes talking about politics.
Gude, who is looking to other ways to get news he cares about, like YouTube, says MSNBC will always have a die-hard Trump-hating audience, but if they want to grow that audience "then they have to talk about the issues and stop talking about Trump."
Kathleen Kendrick, 36, a saleswoman from Colorado who is registered as an independent voter, says she wants more depth when she watches the news, and that much of what she sees is one-sidedness and shallowness.
“You get the story, but only part of the story,” she says. “It would be nice if you got both sides and more research.”
Aunallah is also looking for more depth and variety and says he is no longer interested in "watching the angry man on the corner yell at me."
"Somehow it's their own fault that I'm not watching," he added. “I feel like they've spent all this time talking about the election. They put so much focus on it that when the main event is over, why would people want to keep watching?”
The survey was conducted among 1,251 adults from December 5 to 9, 2024.
