Tuning In and Making Believe

November 18, 2024 Michael Olesker

A streaming debacle prevented millions of Netflix viewers from watching the recent boxing match between Mike Tyson (left) and Jake Paul. (Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images, provided by JTA)

Here’s how some of us are coping with the recent election of President-elect Donald Trump and the stunning selection of his unqualified, sycophantic cabinet choices: we’ve stopped watching cable news.

Last week, the New York Times reported new ratings disasters for MSNBC and CNN, and giddy heights for Fox News, in the aftermath of the Nov. 5 Republican election sweep.

The Times piece was headlined, “Viewers Flee MSNBC, and Flock to Fox News, in Wake of Election.”

Mine is only a snapshot survey, but I keep hearing from distraught friends who voted for Kamala Harris, “I can’t watch anymore. It hurts too much.”

Theirs is an echo of the newspaper numbers, which are supplied by the Nielsen ratings service.

According to The Times, “Prime time viewership at MSNBC has fallen 52 percent from October and jumped 21 percent at Fox News.”

In raw numbers, MSNBC has averaged only 550,000 viewers since Election Day.

And things are even worse at CNN, which has averaged 413,000 viewers since October. That’s a 22 percent decline.

Fox’s prime time audience is about 3.3 million people.

Of course, we live in a nation of more than 300 million people, which makes you wonder why Fox is considered so politically powerful.

Those numbers tells us that roughly 98 out of every 100 people do not watch Fox or either of the other cable news stations.

On the other hand, it’s now reported that a boxing match carried by Netflix the other night between the former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, now 58 years old, and a 27-year-old “social media influencer” named Jake Paul drew 65 million viewers around the world.

We’re expressing our untapped anger and aggressiveness in fresh, new, barbaric ways.

So that’s what we’re watching when we’re no longer watching political coverage on cable news. What’s good about that?

According to an apologetic Netflix, more than 90,000 users reported problems trying to pick up the boxing match. For those people, it’s like the fight never happened.

If we could only have such problems with our big three cable news stations — tune in, but there’s nothing there — maybe we could pretend the whole 2024 election never happened.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).