NEW YORK — As a Democrat who immersed himself in political news during the presidential campaign, Ziad Aunallah has a lot in common with many Americans since the election. He is disconnected.
“People are mentally exhausted,” said Aunallah, 45, of San Diego. “Everyone knows what’s coming and we’re just taking some time off.”
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Television audiences – and now a new poll – clearly illustrate the phenomenon. About two-thirds of U.S. adults say they have recently felt the need to limit their media consumption about politics and government due to overload, according to a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
A smaller percentage of Americans limit their consumption of news about foreign conflicts, the economy or climate change, according to the poll. Politics stands out.
Election news on CNN and MSNBC took up too much of Sam Gude’s time before the election, said the 47-year-old electrician from Lincoln, Nebraska. “The last thing I want to look at right now is the interregnum,” said Gude, a Democrat and no fan of President-elect Donald Trump.
Poll finds more Democrats than Republicans distancing themselves from the news
The poll, taken in early December, found that about seven in ten Democrats say they are withdrawing from politics. The percentage is not as high for Republicans, who have reason to celebrate Trump’s victory. Yet about 6 in 10 Republicans say they also felt the need to take time off, and the share of independents is similar.
The differences are much more marked for television channels that have been consumed by political news.
After election night through Dec. 13, MSNBC’s average prime-time audience was 620,000, down 54% from this year’s pre-election audience, the Nielsen company said . For the same period, CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers was down 45%.
On Fox News Channel, a news network favored by Trump fans, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers is up 13%, Nielsen said. Since the election, 72% of people who watched one of these three cable networks in the evening watched Fox News, up from 53% before Election Day.
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A post-election crisis for fans of the losing candidate is not a new trend for networks that have become strongly identified as a partisan audience. MSNBC experienced similar problems after Trump’s election in 2016. The same went for Fox in 2020, although it was complicated by anger: many of its viewers were then outraged by the channel’s crucial Arizona call for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and sought alternatives.
MSNBC had its own anger issues after several “Morning Joe” viewers became angry that hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited Trump shortly after his victory last month. Yet even though the show’s ratings are down 35% since Election Day, that decline is less than the channel’s during prime time.
CNN points out that while television ratings have suffered, its streaming and digital audiences have remained consistent.
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MSNBC can find some comfort in the story. In previous years, network ratings would rebound when the depression following an election loss dissipated. When a new administration takes office, opponents often look for a place to rally.
“I will come back once the clown show starts,” Aunallah said. “You have no 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 to it.
But the journey may not be smooth. MSNBC’s fall is steeper than it was in 2016; and it is questionable whether Trump’s opponents will want to be as engaged as they were during his first term. People are also unplugging from cable television at increasingly rapid rates, although MSNBC believes it has already resisted this audience-eating trend.
The poll indicates that Americans are less interested in public figures in general talking about politics. After an election season in which support from celebrities like Taylor Swift made headlines, the survey found that Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of celebrities, big businesses and professional athletes who express themselves on politics.
Still, Gude is one of those who is discovering other ways to get information that he wants to pay attention to, especially on YouTube.
MSNBC is also in the midst of corporate upheaval that raises questions about potential changes. Parent company Comcast announced last month that the cable network was among the properties that would be spun off into a new company, giving MSNBC new corporate leadership and cutting its ties to NBC News.
Advice for networks that want to see viewers return
Some of the Americans who have turned away from political news lately also had some advice for re-engaging them.
Gude said, for example, that MSNBC will always have a die-hard audience of Trump haters. But if the channel wants to expand its audience, “then we have to talk about the problems and stop talking about Trump.”
Kathleen Kendrick, a 36-year-old sales representative from Grand Junction, Colo., who is a registered independent voter, said she hears a lot of people loudly expressing their political views at work. She wants more depth when watching the news. Much of what she sees is one-sided and superficial, she said.
“You get a story, but only part of a story,” Kendrick said. “It would be nice if you could have both sides and more research.”
Aunallah, similarly, seeks more depth and variety. He’s no longer interested “in seeing the angry man in the corner yelling at me,” he said.
“It’s kind of their fault that I’m not watching,” he said. “I felt like they were spending all this time talking about the election. They’ve made so much of it that when the main event ends, why would people want to continue watching? »
The survey of 1,251 adults was conducted December 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from the NORC probability test.