In the wake of abysmal CBS News ratings, several of the cognoscenti have been asking themselves who is the new audience that billionaire nepo baby David Ellison, his father Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and their hatchet woman Bari Weiss seek for their, ahem, new and improved CBS. So I won’t belabor that point, as others, such as freelance journalist Noah Berlatsky, Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, and Slate’s Nitish Pahwa have done an excellent job examining the futility of trying to be Fox News Lite. (That’s National Review’s niche.) But that does lead me to the question of who is the intended audience for NewsNation [CQ]? Because I can’t see how the upstart network is a going concern.
As Berlatsky pointed out, “Oligarchs like the Ellisons and Jeff Bezos sincerely believe that taking their media properties hard right will be a financial bonanza, but … it may have occurred to you that the conservative marketplace is incredibly saturated already, and that CBS viewers probably would turn on Fox News if they wanted Fox News.”
The Daily Beast’s Joe Berkowitz (a national treasure) describes NewsNation as “a both-sides news organization only in that its coverage is aimed at both Never Trumpers and Maybe Trumpers — Republicans who find the former president a tad too gauche, but still preferable to Joe Biden.” But while that’s probably Bari Weiss’ goal, I don’t think Nexstar Media Group CEO Perry Sook, the founder of NewsNation, is playing that stupid game plan. But what is Sook playing at?
For those who don’t have elderly relatives who spend too much time online, NewsNation is a cable channel created from Chicago’s WGN that features has-beens both as staff and guests. They’re mostly all here: disgraced former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo; his brother Andrew, the disgraced handsy New York governor and two-time loser against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani; Dem operative and Democratic Leadership Council fossil James Carville; pardoned 1/6 organizer and former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; alleged pedophile Alan Dershowitz; fired House Speaker Kevin McCarthy; fired Fox News nuisances Geraldo Rivera and Bill O’Reilly; forgotten blogger Erick Erickson; disgraced journalist Matt Taibi; fired Trump official liar Sean Spicer; irascible and racist former Fox News anchor Leland Vittert; former Fox News pinch-hitter Katie Pavlich; and laid-off CNN reporter-turned-both-sides-specialist/”But her emails!” moralist Chris Cillizza.
In fairness, NewsNation also makes room for relevant but reprehensible guests such as Project 2025 co-author Hans von Spakovsky, White Nationalism-curious Tucker Carlson, onetime Democratic Senator John Fetterman, allegedly kinder and gentler Border Czar Tom Homan, parking-lot lawyer Jenna Ellis, and even the #PresidentPedo himself. (Yes, your eyes do not deceive you: NewsNation is heavy on folks with lots of sexual misconduct allegations against them. But it’s worse than you think: Bill Shine, a fired Fox News Chief who was called Roger Ailes’ “hatchet man“ for allegedly aggressively intimidating subordinates to cover up for Ailes, has been a “consultant to NewsNation,” whatever that means.)
Jacobin’s Luke Savage summed up NewsNation the best: “J.R.R. Tolkien famously christened ‘cellar door’ as the most aesthetically-pleasing phrase available in the English language. By way of contrast, I submit that it’s nearly impossible to conjure a less euphonious sequence of words than ‘James Carville interviewed by Chris Cuomo.’” So how is that supposed to attract an audience?”
Now like Fox News, NewsNation has proved itself prone to falling for AI fakes, disparaging superior journalists, and holding presidential debates exclusively for no-hope candidates that no one is going to watch. But while The Daily Show counted NewsNation as part of the right-wing media echo chamber, I don’t think that that’s the vibe they’re going for.
I think the Cuomo brothers provide the clue. Andrew and Chris Cuomo are the kind of Democrat who declares anyone who criticizes Israel an antisemite, downplays sexual harassment or political corruption when it involves their colleagues and friends, support diversity and tolerance as long as it’s expedient, would rather deal with Republicans than progressive members of their own party, and think the future of the Democratic Party is the same as the last 35 years of the Democratic Party: tapping the same billionaires as the Republican Party for enough money to swamp any opponents. They don’t stop to think that, once there’s a viable business-friendly GOP candidate, there goes their advantage. Which is how Southern state Democratic officials saw their turf turn ruby-red over the same 35 years.
This conservative Dem bias is why Connell McShane, onetime Fox News anchor turned NewsNationLive host, gave The Columbia Journalism Review this example of balance: “he would be just as likely to book Chad Wolf, the former acting secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a vocal booster of Trump’s radical immigration policies, as John Sandweg, who was the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration.” Notice that in the very small Overton Window no one with questions about ICE’s strategies and competence (or lack thereof) — much less the Abolish ICE contingency — even comes up.
So NewsNation appears to be aimed at a dying breed: Democrats who resent the party’s young voters who have sent voter turnout rates soaring; who are willing to sacrifice black or brown people or trans or gay people in an foolish attempt to attract Whites who already happy in the racist, homophobic Republican Party but don’t want to look too racist while doing it; who stayed home to pout about Hillary Clinton rather than vote for Barack Obama — in short, those who buy
the same narrative centrist Democrats have been peddling since they barely won last November [2020]: the crux of it being that a “noisy” and pronoun-obsessed “identity left,” representing about 15 percent of the party, has become an albatross round the necks of those in the sensible middle — imperiling their prospects with voters who are turned off by rhetoric about defunding the police.
You know who watches NewsNation religiously? My sister-in-law. She’s an old-school Democrat in rural Western Kentucky who just turned 85. She doesn’t understand liberal-arts educations. She’s part of the whopping 12% of Democrats who might call themselves moderate but are actually conservative. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a breakdown of conservative Democrats also broken down by age, but I don’t think it’s a growing sector of the Democratic Party, be it due to actuarial tables or disaffiliation. And I don’t think it’s a lucrative audience for a television network, despite what NewsNation itself says.
The network crowed that it’s “basic-cable’s fastest growing channel” with its 50% audience increase in July 2025. Guess what else? When I gave birth to my second child, the number of children in my house went up by 100%! That’s what happens when you start with very small numbers.
Understandably, NewsNation’s news release didn’t cite actual nightly news numbers, which average 62,000 daytime viewers and 118,000 in primetime in September 2025. Must be why NewsNation didn’t make the Pew Research Center’s list of 30 major news sources. (On the bright side, it means Pew Research Center didn’t advertise how old NewsNation’s audience is.) For comparison, The Daily Show averages 10 times as many viewers, dodgy beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira usually racks up more than eight times as many views on TikTok, the I’ve Had It podcast averages eight times as many views on YouTube, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez averages five times as many on Twitter.
NewsNation’s leading light, James Carville, championed Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2020; Bennet ended up garnering a mere 952 votes in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, behind write-in votes for Donald Trump. Bennet got 0.3 percent of the vote, and that’s NewsNation’s target audience. In other words, there isn’t really an audience for a network of the retired and fired with “all those faces you vaguely remember from when cable was a big deal and they were, too, sorta,” which is Keith Olbermann’s spot-on description. Too bad NewsNation will find out later rather than sooner.
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