TOO FUN TO CHECK: Is Warner/Discovery’s libertarian investor imposing an ideological agenda on CNN?

In the cable news morning show ratings battle, Fox & Friends remains dominant, while MSNBC’s Morning Joe has a solid second and CNN’s New Day lags behind in third place.

In terms of total viewers, the 8 a.m. hour of Fox & Friends more than quadrupled New Day’s total audience on Wednesday.

Fox brought in 1.66 million total viewers at 8 a.m. compared to CNN’s 394,000 total viewers.

MSNBC, meanwhile, registered 766,000 total viewers — which is an average of the 6 through 8 a.m. hours.

Berman and Keilar do a good job of presenting the news and interviewing people of note in a relatively balanced manner. Viewers are not rewarding CNN for that, however; they’re rewarding more casual and more ideologically affirming programming that runs against it. As much as we might admire Malone’s observations on the necessity of straight news reporting, Licht seems to be strategizing on the business realities that argue against it.

In other words, at least so far … it’s business, not personal, and likely not ideological in the sense that Cartwright thinks. But don’t be surprised if the replacement for New Day (assuming the sources are accurate) turns out to be more ideological than the status quo.

Which, as long as they disclose their biases, is just fine. (Although most viewers will cotton on to them even if they don’t,)