“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” “If a ‘talking head’ on CNN is spreading Fake News, is anyone really aware of it?”

It is pretty much an accepted fact now that the mainstream media has a fairly strong left-leaning bias. The question is, how many people are they potentially effecting in reality?

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

The population of The United States is currently 327 million people.

Based on the latest Nielsen Media Research ratings, here are the ratings of news related programming –

Nightly network news:

NBC           7.85 million viewers, or 2.4% of the population (this is a little less than than the population of New York City)

ABC           7.5   million viewers

CBS           6.2    million viewers

Total of  21.55  million viewers, or 6.6 % of the population.  This is roughly the population State of Florida.

Prime time cable news shows:

FOX          2.2  million viewers (about the population of Houston, TX)

MSNBC    1.8  million viewers

Total of    4    million viewers, or 1.2% of the population.  This is roughly the population of the state of Oklahoma.

Daily cable totals (other than prime time):

FOX           1.3  million viewers, or less than 1% of the population.

(about the population of Dallas, TX)

MSNBC    1.0   million viewers

CNN            .83  million viewers (830,000 viewers, about the population of Charlotte, NC)

So, based on these numbers, you can see that overall, less than 8.5% of us are getting any kind of “news” or information from the mainstream media.

The biased mainstream media obviously over-values its own worth, and its own ability of disseminate information of any kind.      

When a commentator on CNN says something, 99.998% of the American people will probably never know about it!

So, to answer the question from the title, “If a ‘talking head’ on CNN is spreading Fake News, is anyone really aware of it?” The answer is no, not really.