Jake Tapper’s ‘The Lead’ Earns New Lows for CNN
Blonde female airheads teamed with male airheads with any hair color = success in tv wingnut land. Just how hard is this to figure out?
Jake Tapper, nicknamed “the face of the new CNN,” debuted his show “The Lead” Monday, earning fairly poor ratings throughout its first week on the air. “The Lead” was saddled with huge expectations prior to its Monday debut, with new CNN boss Jeff Zucker pinning much of the network’s host on its new anchor.
“This is the start of an incredible new era,” Zucker said of Tapper, whom he considers key to his reinvention of CNN.
But in the show’s first four days, Tapper struggled to maintain the audience and ratings of his timeslot’s predecessor, “The Situation Room.” Tapper was third from Monday through Thursday with his first show bringing in 400,000 viewers.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, that’s a 50 percent drop from “The Situation Room” among the crucial 25-54 demographic, as well as an overall 42 percent drop in viewership.