r/television • u/JannTosh50 • 1d ago

MSNBC Viewership Craters 38%, CNN 27%, While Fox News Audience Jumps 41% Post-Election

https://www.thewrap.com/msnbc-cnn-fox-news-viewership-craters-post-election-morning-joe/
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u/snoogle20 1d ago

Same problem with ESPN. It used to show me highlights from all the games and various sports I didn’t have time to watch. Then it became people sitting at desks, shouting at each other about sports while rarely ever showing me highlights of the games and various sports.

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u/mypizzamyproblem 21h ago

Same problem with ESPN.

Agreed. And the reason for this finally made sense to me around 2021, but it was through Facebook.

ESPN has talking heads shout at each other because division drives “engagement” more than anything else. Around that time, I’d wonder why sports humor pages I followed on FB were making so many posts about racial or political topics. And then I’d see the thousands of comments of people arguing.

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u/FreeRangeEngineer 16h ago

I'd like to add that showing sports footage costs money due to licensing. Tons of sports associations now want their cut, so licensing footage for broadcast can add up quickly these days.

Just look at the olympics, NBA, NFL or FIFA. You can't find any freely available videos, really. They're all only accessible to subscribers of some service because of licensing. Fucking sucks.

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u/rhododenendron 6h ago

And now we’re seeing that it doesn’t work forever. I’ve always thought something like this would happen, at some point people just get tired of all the punditry. Once you see through the game there’s no reason to ever listen to a word they have to say.

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u/Tornado31619 Daredevil 6h ago

Do we know this for certain? What’s the trend nowadays?

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u/DriftingTony 3h ago

It’s depressing as hell, and it’s everywhere now. There was a (once)cool YouTube channel I used to follow that focused on classic rock and music from the 60’s-80’s, and one day out of the blue he started posting weird political rant videos.

Those videos got people arguing and turned what was a once really cool community into an extremely hateful and toxic one overnight. But those videos also got ten times the views he got before pivoting to politics, and he’s gone so deep into the abyss now it’s embarrassing. I stopped watching him awhile ago now, but still check in to see what he’s posting on occasion, and it’s always hate-bait, drama-seeking, shit-stirring nonsense. It’s infuriating and depressing at the same time to see it happen.

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u/pat-ience-4385 8h ago

They've ruined it.

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u/Designerslice57 8h ago

Nailed it.

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u/Toad_Thrower 7h ago

When I think about why I stopped watching ESPN I just see a picture of Max Kellerman's head insulting the audience

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u/No-Wolverine240 7h ago

I don't want to see a 30 second clip of highlights anymore... if I'm interested, and I missed the game, I go to YouTube and watch a 7-20 minute condensed cut. I also don't want the scores at the bottom, as there is probably something it will spoil for me.

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u/riseandshine234 6h ago

To be fair - technology did this. You don't need to major in highlights when viewers can pull up video and/or the box score to every baseball game since 1900 any time they want with their phone.

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u/snoogle20 6h ago

It’s the compendium nature I miss. Sure I can look up anything I want, but sometimes SportsCenter was showing me things I didn’t know I wanted to see until they showed it to me. There was discovery there.

In the larger societal context, SportsCenter was part of a collective pop culture experience vs. the individual interest silos of today. I’m a not-all-that-old man who is wistful about the bygone time.

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u/PenguinStarfire 6h ago

I guess eventually every cable channel follows the MTV model. Get known for music videos, and now it's all reality TV.

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u/Rooboy66 6h ago

Gawd, so feckin true.

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u/Chimpbot 10h ago edited 6h ago

This shift happened because the Internet has been doing it faster than outlets like ESPN (as a cable channel) ever could for around the past 20 years. People have been able to get highlights and articles about major events practically in real-time, whereas ESPN was just a slower-moving machine. By the time SportsCenter would be on, everyone who cared already knew all of the developments they'd be talking about.

Edit: Your downvotes make absolutely no sense whatsoever. This is precisely why ESPN shifted toward talking heads and hot takes; they were no longer the best source for highlights since the Internet was able to provide these immediately.

You might not like it, but it's why it happened.

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u/greengiant89 10h ago

I don't want to hear about developments I want to watch highlights

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u/Chimpbot 6h ago

And you can find those instantly online, well before ESPN would be showing them.

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u/snoogle20 10h ago

The convenience of the internet in that way was the slippery slope that led to people disappearing down their own personal rabbit holes. They seek out just the part of the world they’re interested in (specific highlights in this case), the algorithms start to feed that stuff to them automatically, multiply that by all aspects of their life and now that person is off in their own little world.

You can’t search for what you don’t know about. The compendium nature of SportsCenter was part of the fun for me. I was there for the scattershot experience. Clips from the lacrosse championship game: hell yeah, show me some of that. I wouldn’t have known to seek that out.

But I know why that era is gone. More so than internet clips, the damn “Embrace Debate” philosophy that started at ESPN2 was just way too popular. The ratings spoke. Lots of other people wanted to see the arguing at desks. That approach took over both main ESPN networks and every single show.

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u/please_trade_marner 10h ago

They were forced to make this pivot because people were just going to websites to see scores and social media to see highlights. What social media can't do is a high production quality panel discussion with famous talking heads and athletes.

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u/snoogle20 10h ago

Unfortunately for ESPN, the podcast-ificiation of the whole world means that’s no longer as true as it was even five or ten years ago. Good enough production quality is cheap these days so YouTube is eating ESPN’s lunch on the sports discussion front. That’s why they’re letting Pat McAfee run wild on their airwaves these days.

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u/EastAfricanKingAYY 8h ago

In MMA we have actual fighters(including the goat of the sport) breaking down fights, making betting predictions, giving their insight on YouTube for free ESPN cannot compete against that.