Since Donald Trump’s chaotic departure from the White House at the start of 2021, and as COVID fatigue only grew throughout the year, the American public’s appetite for news sharply dropped. Perhaps some decrease was inevitable, given how a once-in-a-century pandemic, a mass protest movement calling for racial justice, and a contentious presidential election drove intense interest and engagement to news outlets in 2020.

Still, the declines for some media outlets were steep, with Axios describing news engagement as having “fell off a cliff.” Weekday prime-time cable news viewership, for instance, dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel, and 25% at MSNBC, according to data tracked by Nielsen. Though some major events in 2021, like the end of the war in Afghanistan, the Derek Chauvin trial, and the second impeachment of Trump, likely garnered outsized engagement, such heightened levels of interest proved fleeting. The more conventional Biden administration has a major departure from the controversy-soaked Trump years, which provided endless fodder for cable producers. As University of Maryland journalism professor Tom Rosenstiel recently told the AP, “You become, to some extent, a prisoner of the audience you built.”

With networks working to draw viewers back in the New Year, Fox News host Jesse Watters suggested Monday that more strife on the left would benefit his network. “I work at Fox. I wanna see disarray on the left. It’s good for America,” Watters said, adding: “It’s good for our ratings.” Though the idea that media companies stir up national conflicts to boost their ratings may not be altogether shocking, Watters bluntly spelling it out drew criticism from a competitor. “It’s the quiet part, he said the quiet part [out loud],” CNN commentator S.E. Cupp remarked Tuesday morning. “I never would have imagined calling Jesse Watters a scholar, however, I think what he just did is really articulate the three pillars of the new American right…. He talks about wanting to see disarray on the left, as if it is somehow not also wanting to see disarray in America, and not just in a political party, but wants real pain in the streets.” Cupp went on to say that conservative media networks prioritize “ratings above all else. That’s true at Fox, where certainly ratings have seemed to trump public health and safety and also facts.”

In the early weeks of 2021, Fox News did lose its place atop the cable news hierarchy, as One America News Network and Newsmax seemingly siphoned off some of its viewers, leading MSNBC and CNN to jump Fox for a brief time. But the network has since recovered its top spot in the standings, a rebound that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott highlighted in her end-of-year statement. “Not only were we the only network to grow our audience share,” she said, “but we did so while changing our lineup and transforming the entire late-night television landscape in the process, ensuring our continued momentum for many years to come.”

Beyond TV news, the AP noted that The Washington Post’s number of unique visitors was down 44% in November 2021 compared to a year earlier, according to Comscore; The New York Times dropped 34% in that time. (The Post has proven especially dependent on political news for traffic.) Still, the New Year has already brought news of a major media launch: On Tuesday, Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith and Ben Smith, the former top editor of BuzzFeed and most recently the New York Times’ star media columnist, announced plans for a start-up targeting a global audience. “There are 200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us,” Ben Smith told his now former paper. “That’s who we see as our audience.”

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