CBS News’ embattled leadership is getting more bad news as its morning show, “CBS Mornings,” dropped below 2 million total viewers at the end of March, a grim milestone that comes as CBS’ parent company, Paramount, prepares to settle President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News’ flagship program, “60 Minutes.” 

While CBS News struggles to right the ship from multiple antisemitism controversies involving its reliably liberal staff, its executives are being mocked for participating in a high-risk stunt to goose the morning show’s ratings:, a flight into space by Ms. King, the pop star Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez, the fiance of Jeff Bezos, on board one of Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecrafts.  

For decades, morning news shows have been one of the biggest profit drivers for ABC, NBC, and CBS – at the same time as other news programs at the broadcast networks are believed to be losing money, or just breaking even, based on the Byzantine internal methods of calculating profit and loss within a business unit. However, with the secular decline of broadcast television accelerating rapidly, all three networks have seen the ratings for their morning programming drop sharply in recent years. The shows have about half the audience they had only a decade ago. But the“CBS Mornings,” which has been in third place for decades and has endured multiple name changes and re-castings, is the worst off of the trio, lagging further and further behind NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Data from Nielsen ratings shows that “GMA” drew 2.8 million total viewers, and “Today” drew in 2.6 million total viewers for the last two weeks of March. During that same time period, “CBS Mornings” drew fewer than 2 million total viewers. This means that “Fox & Friends” is nipping at the venerable morning show’s heels.