With the election over and the Hallmark Channel beginning its annual “Countdown to Christmas” lineup of films, legacy media outlets have gotten some truly awful, highly embarrassing news from the ratings watchers: they’ve been beaten out on cable by the Hallmark Channel, with more viewers tuning in to watch cheesy movies than their fake news.

As background, when the news about Hallmark blowing CNN and MSNBC out of the water broke, it was a bit into its annual “Countdown To Christmas” programming, having started releasing the thirty-two movies in its holiday lineup. As those sort of movies have very strong appeal to the Christmas-loving mom demographic, they have the potential to explode in the ratings and push Hallmark well above even popular cable news, and sometimes sports, broadcasts.

And that Hallmark did. Over the week of November 11 to 17, the channel rocketed up the ratings list and became the third most popular cable channel in two key categories: primetime viewership and total-day viewership. In so doing, it beat out both MSNBC and CNN for those coveted viewers and slots on the ratings list.

In fact, the only cable channels that managed to beat it were Fox News Channel, which has been doing well for cable news even as MSNBC and CNN suffer severely, and ESPN, which makes sense given how preoccupied many Americans are with sports programming during football season.

The numbers it managed to garner are wild. Over that November 11 to 17 week, the Hallmark Channel managed to bring in an average of 810,000 viewers for its primetime offerings, and a highly impressive 479,000 average viewers at any given point in the day, quite a large number given its niche content.

Those numbers, and the massive ratings success Hallmark has seen, come since it began debuting its Christmas, and general holiday season, movie lineup on October 18. Since then, it has risen steadily, gaining audience members each week and going from being the seventh most popular total-day channel with 387,000 average viewers to the third most popular, with the massive number of viewers described above.

While the news is great for Hallmark, it is probably even worse for CNN and MSNBC. Particularly, it shows that they face notably grim futures where, though a relatively large number of people are tuning into Fox News Channel, they have trouble using their seemingly unlimited resources to even garner an audience that competes with a cheesy movies channel.

Commenting on the matter on X (formerly Twitter), Shawn Farash said, “Good morning X! CNN and MSNBC are now being beaten in the ratings by the HALLMARK CHANNEL. The media is being rendered irrelevant. They are melting down because they have been replaced by X, and a new crop of truly FREE, independent media. WE are the media now!”

One commenter said, “What a glorious thing. I can’t think of a better way to show them they are officially irrelevant. Of course, they will continue to double down their way out of a job!! 👊🏻” Another joked about the sort of content on CNN and MSNBC, saying, “Weird, i figured there was more cheesy drama on CNN/MSNBC.”