CNN must be wishing it had President Trump to kick around some more.

What else to say to the news that its ratings have gone "down the toilet" as mrcNewsBusters put it?

...as per the latest Nielsen ratings, CNN has continued to hemorrhage viewers with primetime and entire day total viewership down over 70 percent since January.

Nielsen Media Research has the breakdown and it’s not pretty, no matter how the Zucker Borg would spin it. Since a January high of roughly 798,000 primetime viewers and 530,000 total day viewers in the 25-54 demographic, CNN has fallen off a cliff and into the pit of misery with the network fetching only 229,000 in primetime and 152,000 in total day over the past month.

That, dear NewsBusters readers, would represent a cratering of 71 percent for both metrics

Seventy-some percent is a lot of viewers, more than two-thirds, nearly three-quarters of them. And that's with airports, where theyve got a large captive CNN audience, actually reopening. Imagine a CEO of a widget company announcing numbers like those! He'd be out on his ear. 

CNN, though, did poorly when President Trump was at the helm, too. Its creepy biases, concealing news and slanting coverage in a bid to get him out of office, must have seemed like a good idea at the time. 

It wasn't. Trump and all the hate against Trump that they bottled and sold to viewers actually kept them afloat. Now they are in freefall.

Here's the nasty reality that is hitting them: Their bad ratings then were a ceiling, not a floor, and now that they've got what they wanted, a Trump-free America, their ratings are spiraling without a bottom. This comes at a bad time, given that all of the major cable news networks are seeing some level of lost viewership, too. That's the broad trend, a down-market, as they say, so it's all happening against what those in the stock market call "headwinds." They're all doing bad, but CNN has done far more poorly the others, a laggard in a lagging market

Several things come to mind to explain this travesty.

One, they've got nothing but contempt for their leftist viewers.

They're down to stupid stunts targeting their own viewers in a bid to goose up viewership.

American Thinker editor in chief Thomas Lifson noted this embarrassing one just a few days ago:

Is planting misleading innuendo about oneself a good tool to sell the services of an information provider? In what other product category does one openly debase the quality as a means of gathering attention?

Tucker Carlson, whose viewership is more than 4 times that of Don Lemon’s, likes to characterize the CNN host as stupid. That label certainly applies to the publicity stunt trick Lemon pulled on Friday night:

“CNN Tonight” anchor Don Lemon announced Friday that “this will be the last night” of the show he’s hosted since 2014 — only to clarify in a later Twitter video that he was not leaving the network.

Lemon shocked viewers by ending his news show Friday with a closing on-air segment in which he suddenly revealed the end of his program on the network.

“It’s been really, really great. This is the last night that will be ‘CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.'” he said. “So, I appreciate all the years of ‘CNN Tonight with Don Lemon,’ but changes are coming, and I will fill you in.”

Lemon then segued into a promo for a CNN documentary about Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, “What’s Going On.”

CNN revealed that it must have been in on the hoax when it then headlined, “CNN viewers panic after Don Lemon's announcement about his show,” as if there are human beings that would panic over losing the ability to view a news commentator whose intellect is so penetrating that he speculated that a missing Malaysian airliner might have gone into a black hole.  If anyone is panicking, it is CNN, which is dealing with a 16% decline in Lemon's ratings year-on-year.

A mere 15 minutes after the stunt puzzled people, Lemon continued the stunt and posted a video to Twitter with another tease, but letting all those panic-stricken viewers that they would not be missing the daily (weekdays) dose of numbskullery at 10 PM Eastern:

So do viewers enjoy being played for fools? Gotcha, huh! huh! huh! -- Beavis and Butthead-style? Apparently the ratings say 'no.' Not many businesses make it their mission to insult their customers by exposing them as simpleton boobs. Who'd want to watch that? Lemon lost 77% of his viewers since January, according to Fox News. This stunt didn't seem to fix it.

Two, they're trying what the Daily Wire identifies as "partisanship and profanity" to keep their viewers happy, not in addition, but in place of doing news as they used to. Profanity? Gee, seems the viewers can't get profanity on the streets and on the rest of the Internet in sufficient quantity, so CNN is the place to go. What an innovative product, /sarc. They're selling something pretty old if viewed from elsewhere.

Three, and it's a big one: They've dumped all standards of journalism at all, issuing forth a tainted product instead of reliable news.

Daily Wire cites a Washington Post article that claims CNN has "abandoned industrywide standards of impartiality" in favor of partisanship in a bid to appear "authentic" which was a euphemistic way of saying they let their ids go wild and journalistic standards go out the window. Except of course, that they'd been doing that for awhile, pretty much all four years of President Trump's administration. What's happened recently was that they accelerated the trend, and now are not even trying to hide it. They're going Lester Holt, declaring fairness in reporting "overrated."

What it amounts to is non-performance. Journalists are paid to do journalism. They don't want to do their job as journalists, and now viewers are noticing. 

Actually, it was even worse than that, based on the findings of investigative journalist James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas project called "Expose CNN." They morphed their operation into a Democratic Party political operation apparatus, becoming a sort of less-competent Democratic Party propaganda organ, with sorry things going on like this:

According to Fox 45 News Baltimore, and Sinclair Broadcasting Group:

WASHINGTON (SBG) — Project Veritas unveiled a video Tuesday the group says is of a CNN staffer describing how the network worked to show then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden in a favorable light during the 2020 presidential campaign.

The undercover video captured a man, the self-proclaimed conservative watchdog group identified as CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester, saying he decided to work with the network because it focused on removing former President Donald Trump. Chester also credited CNN as a critical tool to electing Biden.

“Look what we did, we [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn't for CNN, I don't know that Trump would have got voted out. I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that,” the man said in one portion of the video.

Chester was speaking to someone off-camera at undisclosed locations. He was targeted through the dating app Tinder, according to Mediate, citing a source close to CNN. The unidentified Project Veritas employee went on a total of five dates with Chester, the Tuesday Mediate report noted.

That's naked political partisanship, coming from a purported news outlet, and worse still, concealing it from their viewers, once again, playing them for fools. 

If viewers want that, they can go to the Democratic National Committee news site, yet as with the other things, CNN's decisionmakers expect viewers to come to CNN instead and be their boobs.

The network, in constantly trying to be profane, unfair, propagandistic, partisan, dishonest, contemptuous, is doing so much of this it's killing its actual mission. What happens when companies of other kinds repeatedly violate the trust of their customers? They stop buying. Seems that's what's going on with CNN now. Trump knew that when he hit out at them for various things. CNN, though, didn't. Now they don't have Trump to kick around anymore.

Image: Ken Lund, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0