4 Months. 4 Indictments. How Much Do Cable News Viewers Still Care?
Mid-August brought yet another indictment against Donald Trump — his second in as many weeks, and fourth in under five months. That’s pretty impressive (or depressing given, well, everything that’s happened over the last few years). But with the myriad criminal charges that just keep a comin’, is Trump fatigue setting in?
Before the Georgia indictment, Axios examined Google Trends and found there’s been a general drop in public interest around Trump’s legal spectacles. Now, Inscape is sharing cable news viewership insights for CNN, Fox News and MSNBC to see how tune-in rates changed as each indictment was handed down. In short, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, although this week’s fourth indictment — one with an arraignment and trial that will be different than the others — suggests a bit of reinvigorated interest.
Notably, viewership was higher across the board on arraignment days vs. indictment days, perhaps because people were more interested in hearing how Trump would react and plea than learning the nitty gritty details of the charges themselves. (Trump hasn’t had his fourth arraignment yet, so that may change). And overall, Fox News captured more tune-in than CNN and MSNBC by a wide margin, sometimes with a 2-3x higher viewership share, while MSNBC scored slightly higher viewership than CNN for each of the indictment and arraignment days.
The biggest bump occurred on the day of Trump’s first arraignment, April 4, 2023, which was related to the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal. Fox News led by a wide margin, capturing a 9.25% viewership share across all linear TV networks that day, followed by MSNBC (3.84%) and CNN (3.80%). By comparison, on the day the first indictment was announced (March 30), Fox News had a 7.01% viewership share, MSNBC had 2.77% and CNN 2.13%.
Of the four exact indictment announcement days, CNN and MSNBC saw the largest viewership share when the second indictment (related to the classified documents case) was announced. Interestingly, that was the lowest indictment day viewership share for Fox News. But, an important caveat: Because the fourth indictment was announced late at night on August 14, it didn’t contribute much to the overall cable news viewership that day. Given that, Inscape also looked at the day after (August 15) and found that it had the highest viewership share for CNN (2.42%) and MSNBC (3.78%) out of all the indictment days. It’ll be interesting to see if Trump’s fourth arraignment, which is supposed to happen by early September and could include cameras in the actual courtroom, sparks renewed interest.
When it comes to who’s actually watching cable news — and thus generating the trends — it’s what you probably expect: Older people. Per iSpot.tv, so far in 2023, CNN’s audience (based on median TV ad impressions) skews just slightly younger: 50 to 54 years old, vs. Fox News and MSNBC which both have a median age range of 55-59 years old.
