Cable news went into 2025 hoping the return to a more “normal” political cycle would stabilize audiences. Instead, it delivered a ratings reckoning, with MS NOW and CNN enduring steep, across-the-board declines while Fox News tightened its already dominant grip on the marketplace. For out-of-home (OOH) buyers and planners, the year’s numbers amount to a reset of where attention, influence, and premium environments really live on the cable dial.
According to Nielsen Big Data + Panel, MS NOW’s primetime audience fell by roughly a quarter in 2025, dropping 25% to an average of 923,000 viewers. CNN fared only slightly better, finishing the year down 15% with an average of 580,000 primetime viewers. Both networks saw declines in total day as well as in the key adults 25-54 demo, marking what Fox News described—using the same Nielsen data—as “historic lows” for its rivals. CNN’s 25-54 audience slid to 70,000 in total day and 102,000 in primetime, the lowest in the network’s history, while MS NOW posted its weakest 25-54 performance since its 1997 launch year.
The year-long slide was not a blip tied to a single soft quarter. Monthly snapshots underscore the structural nature of the downturn. In November 2025, MS NOW was down 13% in total viewers and 45% in adults 25-54 in primetime versus November 2024, and down 17% and 40%, respectively, in total day. CNN’s November picture was even more severe in primetime: down 23% in total viewers and 49% in the demo year over year, with total day tumbling 11% in viewers and 35% in A25-54. Both networks showed modest gains versus October 2025—MS NOW up double digits month to month, CNN similarly higher—but the incremental recoveries did little to offset steep annual erosion.
In sharp contrast, Fox News used 2025 to extend a decade of leadership and turn a non-election year into its strongest non-election performance on record. The network averaged 3,118,000 viewers in weekday primetime, edging out NBC’s 3,099,000 and ranking as the third highest-rated network in all of television. Across primetime, Fox commanded 64% of the cable news audience and 63% across total day, its highest share since launch in 1996. While MS NOW and CNN contracted, Fox grew—up in both total day and primetime compared with 2024, making it the fastest-growing network in all of cable with viewers across total day and the fastest-growing in cable news primetime.
Program-level data illustrates how thoroughly the balance of power has shifted. In 2025, the 12 most-watched shows in cable news all aired on Fox News, led by “The Five,” which averaged 4.1 million viewers and delivered its best year ever since launching in 2011. “The Five” not only topped cable news for the fourth consecutive year, it outdelivered legacy broadcast properties such as “CBS Evening News.” By comparison, MS NOW’s top entry, “The Rachel Maddow Show” at 9 p.m. Mondays, drew 1.823 million total viewers and 166,000 adults 25-54 in November. CNN’s best performer that month, “The Arena with Kasie Hunt” at 4 p.m., averaged 712,000 viewers, with “The Lead with Jake Tapper” leading its 25-54 ranks at 111,000. The gap between Fox’s upper tier and the strongest programs on MS NOW and CNN now routinely runs into the low seven figures in absolute audience.
For advertisers, and especially for brands investing in OOH campaigns tied to cable news environments—airport networks, digital place-based screens in offices, gyms, bars, and transit hubs—the implications are significant. First, reach and frequency assumptions baked into MS NOW- and CNN-centric plans may no longer hold. A 25% primetime decline for MS NOW and a 15% decline for CNN, compounded by double-digit demo losses, mean fewer impressions delivered for the same schedule unless buys are recalibrated. Second, audience composition is shifting. Fox News continues to emphasize its claim that more independents and Democrats tune to its programming than to competitors, and that it leads among Hispanic, Asian, and upscale viewers according to Nielsen MRI Fusion, a positioning that challenges traditional political and demographic stereotypes around conservative cable news.
Third, fragmentation is complicating how “cable news” is defined for OOH alignment. Fox News reports 4.3 billion views on YouTube in 2025, outpacing MS NOW, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS on the platform. While those digital streams do not directly translate to classic cable OOH impressions, they reinforce brand familiarity and program discovery that carry over into public-viewing environments. For marketers, the effective “OOH halo” around Fox News content now extends well beyond the linear set.
The weaker performance of MS NOW and CNN does not mean those brands have lost relevance, particularly in high-information, urban, and institutional environments where they remain default choices on screens in newsrooms, government buildings, universities, and airports. Their audiences, though smaller, are still sizable and often highly engaged, with news junkies and professionally informed viewers who over-index in influence relative to raw numbers. But the 2025 ratings report is a clear warning that relying on legacy assumptions about parity among the big three cable news networks is no longer viable.
For OOH buyers, the practical takeaway is to treat cable news less as a three-network category and more as a landscape dominated by one ratings giant and flanked by two brands navigating structural decline. Plans that simply “rotate among news nets” risk overweighting underperforming inventory and underleveraging the channel that now commands nearly two-thirds of cable news viewing. As the industry looks ahead to the next election cycle and another potential audience spike, the 2025 data suggests that any resurgence is likely to be uneven—and that Fox News will enter that period from a position of unprecedented strength, while MS NOW and CNN will be fighting uphill just to get back to where they once were.