The Great Corporate Media Unplug

Joy Reid and Chris Wallace are just the first corporate media hacks to be flushed out in 2022

Two recent articles from Axios and the Associated Press finally quantified just how much the American public has turned off corporate media in 2021.

In 2021, CNN’s weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38%.

Fox News Channel was down 34%.

MSNBC dropped 25%.

This no doubt helps to explain why unpopular hosts like Chris Wallace at Fox News and Joy Reid at MSNBC are being removed from their slots.

The old broadcast television evening newscasts also declined:

ABC’s “World News Tonight” was down 12%.

CBS “Evening News” was also down 12%.

NBC’s “Nightly News” declined 14%.

As for legacy print media, the losses were equally staggering:

The Washington Post had a 44% decline in unique visitors to their site when comparing November 2021 to November 2020.

The New York Times had a 34% decline in unique visitors to their site when comparing November 2021 to November 2020.

What’s even more incredible is that social media “engagement” (likes, comments, shares) with news articles was down 65% between 2020 and 2021.

The obvious question: where did all those viewers go? It looks like the American public is switching over to independent media. There’s plenty of evidence for this hypothesis. Joe Rogan’s podcast now has an audience that’s almost 4 times the size of the highest rated cable news shows. That’s right: 11 million people listened to the latest Joe Rogan podcast.

When Joe Rogan opened a social media account on GETTR this week to protest censorship on Twitter, more than 1 million people followed his advice and joined GETTR as well. The liberal YouTube pundit Tim Pool has an audience of over 3.3 million subscribers on that site. Glenn Greenwald and other independent journalists have helped Substack reach 1 million paid subscribers recently. The new alternative to YouTube, Rumble had 1 million users last year but has 30 million users now.

All of these stories suggest that the corporate media’s relentless gaslighting campaign against the American public in recent years has backfired spectacularly. Twitter is in serious decline and this is not simply an issue for its American audience. Facebook’s audience has peaked already too. People no longer trust America’s corporate media institutions for good reasons.

The Great Corporate Media Unplug is here.