The viewers who were clinging to CNN’s daily promises of President Trump in a prison cell have fled the cable news channel by the thousands.

Like fans whose team has gone down five runs in the bottom of the 8th, CNN viewers headed for the exits once President Donald Trump escaped serious harm from the Mueller report.

According to Ad Week, CNN lost a full third of their audience compared with the first week of June last year.

Don Irvine of Accuracy in Media says the Mueller report “took the wind out of the sails” at CNN and MSNBC after months of building expectations.

“They had been building up these expectations that say Trump is going to be guilty of collusion and obstruction of justice, and all these things,” he recalls. “And they had been leading their viewers down this path and then there was nothing there.”

In one ranking, CNN got less of an audience than Nickelodeon and HGTV.

Over at MSNBC, the carnage wasn’t quite as bad but Irvine says that might be because viewers gave up on it some time ago. Their most popular host, Rachel Maddow, lost a half-million viewers in one week following the Mueller bust.

“There’s a certain amount of news fatigue with this,” Irvin observes. “There’s a lot of stuff, and a lot of hype and expectation, and then when the results finally hit, people are like, OK, I think I’ll just move my attention somewhere else for now.”

So where did all the viewers go? Not to hated Fox News, which maintained a wide lead over its cable news competitors but didn’t add viewers.

According to Irvine, it appears the Never Trumpers waiting for Trump in handcuffs just picked up their ball and went home.

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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.

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