“They’re doing a lot of damage,” grumps O’Reilly, of the city’s homeless population. “They’re ruining a city. Do you not get that?”
Cuomo harrumphs that he’s certainly aware of the situation, and off they go. The two men thrust and parry about the topic for several minutes, ultimately sort of agreeing that people on the streets need help. Then Cuomo takes a few phone calls and lets O’Reilly plug his newsletter and latest book.
Their talking-head throwdown — a vision of the Ghosts of Cable News Past — plays out every Wednesday on Cuomo’s weeknightly hour of commentary. But “Cuomo,” as his new show is pithily dubbed, doesn’t air on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. It’s a signature offering of NewsNation, a new channel attempting to take on the Big Three by evoking a less partisan era of cable news — in part by featuring old familiar faces from the outlets it aims to compete with.
At a time when the cable news industry is struggling to retain viewers, it may be a problematic business plan. Launched in 2020, NewsNation still draws rounding-error ratings, despite a small boost from the CNN veteran, who joined the network in October. It averaged about 63,000 viewers per night during 2022, ranking it 107th among national networks. By comparison, even ratings-challenged CNN — which has fallen behind Fox News and MSNBC — regularly attracts more than 10 times as many viewers per night.
At the moment, news isn’t even the leading draw on NewsNation. Its highest-rated program last year was daytime reruns of “Blue Bloods,” the Tom Selleck cop drama that is a holdover from WGN America, the cable channel NewsNation used to be.
Nevertheless, owner Nexstar Media Group — the Dallas-area company that also owns the CW broadcast network and the Hill newspaper — says it aims to build the next big news brand by appealing to viewers who say they’re turned off by rabid partisanship.
Nexstar has positioned NewsNation as a moderate, down-the-middle news and talk source, essentially what CNN used to be and is trying to become again. Dan Abrams, the longtime former MSNBC anchor and executive who now hosts NewsNation’s 9 p.m. Eastern show, says the target audience is “the marginalized moderate majority.”
“CNN and Fox have become echo chambers for a passionate audience that believes the same things as the hosts and producers of those networks,” says Michael Corn, NewsNation’s president of news. “Their playbook is, ‘Lets interview five people who agree with us and put them on.’ … We believe there’s a huge audience that’s not being served by the other channels.”
What “nonpartisanship” means in practice on NewsNation isn’t always clear. It’s true that its evening news-discussion programs don’t feature panels of talking heads, stacked to score political points. Its basic reporting seems solid and down the middle, too, though with a decided emphasis on the day’s true-crime stories, such as the killing of four University of Idaho students and the drama surrounding a missing wife and mother from Massachusetts.
But it’s not hard to find opinions and points of view on the network, either. Discussing Rep. George Santos’s multiple lies recently, NewsNation host Leland Vittert framed a question to a guest this way: “Am I being too conspiratorial to think that the New York Times and others … knew who George Santos was, and let him get elected so they’d have this phenomenal story and cudgel to beat Republicans up with?”
If Vittert’s name rings a bell, that’s part of the strategy, too. Like an expansion franchise in its first year, NewsNation’s entire evening block, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern on weeknights, is stocked with refugees from the other teams.
Vittert, an ex-weekend anchor at Fox News, holds down the 7 p.m. hour, followed by Cuomo, followed by Abrams (who still holds the post of chief legal analyst at ABC News as well). He’s followed at 10 p.m. by Ashleigh Banfield, who once anchored programs on MSNBC and CNN. The political editor is Chris Stirewalt, who held that position at Fox News.
Coming soon: Elizabeth Vargas, the former co-anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “20/20,” who will anchor a new weekday newscast from New York. (NewsNation is headquartered in Chicago.)
Corn himself is an alum of ABC News; he was senior executive producer of “Good Morning America” when he left in early 2021 to join NewsNation.
Like Cuomo, who was driven out of CNN last year over his effort to stage-manage the sexual-harassment scandal of his governor brother, Corn comes with some baggage. He left Disney-owned ABC a few months before a former “GMA” producer filed a lawsuit accusing him of assaulting her and another female staffer in 2015. Corn and Disney, a co-defendant, denied the accusations. A judge dismissed the suit last year, citing the statute of limitations, but not before the allegations caused tumult within ABC News.
NewsNation declined to comment. But people at the network point out that Corn hasn’t had trouble attracting an experienced staff: More than 20 former ABC journalists, including Cuomo, Abrams and Vargas, now work for him.
Whether that’s enough of a lure for audiences, of course, is another matter, especially at a time when the cable news model, and cable itself, seems to be fraying as viewers cut their cable cords and shift to streaming services. Several other start-ups that tried to enter the market in recent years, including Fusion TV, Al Jazeera America, and Black News Channel, were never able to get traction and have been shut down or absorbed into other entities. CNN recently canceled most original news programming on long-running spinoff HLN, largely replacing it with true-crime shows. Several regional cable news outlets have called it quits in recent years, too.
A more basic question seems to be at play: Does “nonpartisanship,” however defined, really draw a crowd in cable news? Although people may say they’re turned off by political tribalism, what they actually watch is altogether different. The cable news giants for years have attracted loyal viewers largely by appealing to their ideological loyalties, not by offering one-size-fits-all fare.
“It’s just hard to fathom the old model on another network will flourish,” says Carol Costello, a former CNN anchor who now teaches journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “People are not watching news the way they used to. I don’t see anything on NewsNation [that is] particularly new.”
She added, “I applaud NewsNation for trying. It is a challenge to teach [and] explain what journalism actually is today and why it’s important. That makes me achingly said.”
While NewsNation doesn’t figure to challenge the Big Three for viewers anytime soon, the cable news market remains a vast and lucrative field, even as many of its viewers disperse. Establishing even a minor toehold could pay off.
Between them, Fox, CNN and MSBNC collected an estimated $5.7 billion in advertising revenue and license fees from cable and satellite operators last year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, a research firm. That figure was a modest 3 percent increase over in 2021, but it does suggest that NewsNation is aiming to join a rich club — one that is less crowded than the entertainment field it left behind when it decided to remodel WGN.
Despite the challenges, NewsNation is starting with some distinct advantages. One is the resources of its parent company; Nexstar, headquartered in Irving, Tex., is the nation’s largest owner of local TV stations, with nearly 200, including in New York, Los Angeles and Washington. The stations employ more than 5,000 local journalists, which NewsNation can draw on in covering domestic news.
That strength was evident, for example, in NewsNation’s coverage of the Federal Aviation Administration’s order in January to halt national air traffic because of a technical glitch. Its reporting, which stretched across more than 12 minutes of its hour-long evening newscast, included field reports from Nexstar journalists in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and other cities.
NewsNation also saw a nice audience bump last fall when it aired candidate debates produced by Nexstar stations in Pennsylvania, Texas and Georgia.
“There’s definitely a pomposity around what cable news does,” Abrams said in an interview. “The die-hard right or left will not love my show. But there’s a hole in the marketplace, and we’re trying to fill it. … We want to be the antidote to the outrage machine.”
