Shepard Smith Just Got Humiliated, His New CNBC Show Is Horribly Dying In The Cable News Ratings

 Remember Shepard Smith, the former Fox News daytime host who was universally hated by a vast majority of Fox News’ viewers?

If you hadn’t heard, the left-leaning news personality picked up a new gig at CNBC earlier this year. The network, in an attempt to take a slice of nightly news pie with a new, hard news program, gave Smith his own show, which they called “The News With Shepard Smith.”

While there was initially some excitement from both Smith and the business-heavy cable news network prior to the show’s launch, it’s probably safe to assume that the excitement has greatly subsided, as it’s getting absolutely destroyed in the cable news ratings game.

Before getting into the actual numbers, I should point out that, according to Mediaite, Smith’s new show is so apparently unappealing to the masses that it has actually fallen behind the repeat broadcast of Fox Business Channel’s show, Lou Dobbs Tonight.

That’s pretty bad.

In the show’s first week, it managed to wrangle about 343,000 total viewers, which was low to begin with, but not unexpected given that it was a brand new show and a new concept from a network that focuses primarily on business news.

But the second week came and went, giving Smith and CNBC a total of 268,000 viewers. Week three was even worse, with the show only garnering a humiliating 254,000 viewers. This week is the show’s fourth week and from Mediaite’s reporting, it’s on track to attract even less viewers.

In the ultra-lucrative gold standard group of demographics for most television networks, Smith’s new show brought in very little of the 25-54 crowd. Bad ratings — especially this bad — spell trouble for a new show. Advertisers tend to not spend their advertising dollars on shows that nobody watches.

Smith seems like the kind of guy who will keep an optimistic smile on his face as he tries to steer a dying show away from troubled waters, but for a news personality who is accustomed to averaging millions of viewers per show –which he somehow managed to do at Fox News even though he was probably the least popular personality at the network — tanking a new show at a second-rate cable news network has to be a huge blow to his ego.

Mediaite senior editor Joe DePaolo was one of the first reporters to predict the rapid downfall of Smith’s new program on CNBC, pointing out that Smith was unlikely to bring any fans from Fox News along with him while adding that hard news, as opposed to opinion programming, is enough of a hard sell on big networks, let alone a tiny one like CNBC.

“And his new show is likely doomed. Completely, hopelessly doomed,” DePaolo said. “Odds are that his new show will not upset many. But that’s only because they won’t be watching in the first place.”

He sure did nail that prediction.