Has CNN lost 70% of their audience compared to the beginning of the year, mainly because Trump is no longer president?

Question

An opinion piece in The Hill says:

That's what happens when all-things-Trump are myopically put at the forefront of every offering: You take J.R. Ewing off "Dallas," and there's no more "Dallas." You take Trump off the stage, there's no more cable news that has existed since June 2015, no more late-night "comedy" on CBS, NBC and ABC. It's the main (albeit not only) reason why CNN has lost nearly 70 percent of its audience since the beginning of the year, while MSNBC is down more than 40 percent.

Can this claim of causality be substantiated somehow? First, I'm guessing that the events in January had a lot of people "glued" to their TV, so perhaps a year-on-year comparison would be more appropriate. Second, does this fit some kind of general pattern of left-leaning TV/media being less watched during Democratic presidencies?

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I'm not personally skeptical of the precise figures given below from Carolina Coast Online--thanks Joe W for editing these in--, but they were linked in the Hill piece to justify the 70%. I suppose it's the fact that Fox News lost substantially less audience that's part of the claim/evidence.

CNN’s drop in viewers is larger than its competitors, but all major cable news shows have experienced a drop. MSNBC had the second-largest drop in viewership since January, losing 49% of its total viewership between January and May. In the 25-54 age demographic, the network lost 63% of its viewers. During primetime hours, MSNBC lost 42% of its total viewers and 58% of viewers between the ages of 25 and 54.

Fox News had the least substantial drop out of all networks, losing 12% of its total viewers and 15% of viewers between the ages of 25-54 between January and May.

Answer 1

Based on (what is claimed to be) the CNN weekly Nielson ratings here CNN had a significant uptick in viewership in 2020, relative to 2019 levels, and in 2021, its viewership has returned to about 2019 levels. These data do indicate that CNN has encountered a very large (>50%) drop in viewership since January 2021. There is not evidence in this data that Trump being the president played a significant role in driving CNN's viewership -- the uptick occurred in early 2020 long after Trump had assumed office.

My eyeballing of the chart indicates at least a 50% drop. My read of the chart is that the multi-month average weekly viewership from June 2020 through Jan 2021 was about 1.2M viewers, though with several significant spikes. The long term average over the the summer of 2021 is around 0.6M -- so a 50% decline. Depending on the exact baseline used, and how one handles the transient spikes in viewership in 2021, one could obtain the quoted 70% drop, but this could be quibbled with.

Note that the current viewership levels are about the same as in 2019 and earlier (when Trump was in office); so it looks like 2020 was an anomalous uptick in viewership. Correlation is not causation and all that, but the uptick did overlap with the emergence of Covid-19 in the US, BLM protests and the ramp-up of the US Presidential election.

FWIW, Fox News exhibited a similar overall pattern: relatively steady levels over 2018 and 2019, an uptick in 2020, and a return to baseline in 2021. The details differ a bit, for example the magnitude of the 2021 uptick might be lower, and there is a current (Aug 2021) uptick not seen in the CNN data, but overall, the pattern is similar.

Additional sources

• This Pew Research Report includes Comscore TV Essentials data that corroborates an increase in cable news viewership in early 2020.
• The Nielsen data linked to above are consistent with what CNN itself reported about its ratings in May 2020