A&E’s viewership drops 49% after canceling ‘Live PD’
A&E Network lost nearly half its prime-time viewers since scrapping the popular police reality series “Live PD” in response to the George Floyd protests, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Average prime-time viewership for A&E between June 11 and July 19 was down 49% from the same period last year, the report said. Average daily viewership was down 36% from a year earlier.
A&E told The Wall Street Journal in a statement that the drop was a “temporary hit in the ratings” that the network anticipated due to the popularity of the show, and that it had mostly been replaced by reruns. “The network said it has always been able to ‘find new hits and reinvent ourselves,’” the newspaper reported.
I guess canceling a realistic show about police to appease Black Lives Matter, and replacing it with reruns was a stupid idea.
In traditional economics, every executive that signed onto a decision that knowingly would lose half the audience of the channel for a fringe special interest group would be fired and made persona non grata in business for there on out.
Now, losing have the viewers of a channel is just the cost of going woke, which is more acceptable.
This will only end when shareholders and investors start suing these managers.
If something like Live PD causes boycotts and drives down viewers then cancel it. But to preemtively cancel it knowing there will be a loss is bad for investors and the decision makers should be held to account.
Furthermore, it’s predictable that if A&E would cancel their most popular show to appease BLM, then the new shows they come up with will be equally woke bullshit like Transgender Toddlers or Nonbinary Vegan Organic Farming. Shit nobody will want to watch but will be praised by all the right-thinking critics.
Maybe when some executives lose everything for breach of fiduciary duty, companies will get the message.
“This will only end when shareholders and investors start suing these managers.”
Why hasn’t this happened yet? I mean, it’s like clockwork; every time a company goes woke, it winds up getting hammered. How does this not end in shareholders going ballistic?
Probably because A&E is part of a huge conglomerate corporation and their failure is just a small part of the overall results in the corporation?
ABC is just a part of Disney, heck Disney itself is just a small part of Disney Corp. now.
About the only stand-alone Major Media Enterprise left is the New York Times, and their controlling stock is closely held by the Sulzbergers and Ochs Families.
For the investors this is a good thing, when screwups like this happen, their investment remains intact. If you had invested in A&E Standalone Inc., your investment would have lost most of its value.