Larry King may not be the only person leaving CNN as the network’s ratings continue to sag.

From the New York Post

CNN’s flagship anchor Anderson Cooper may be “close to leaving the network,” according to TheWrap.com

Larry King announced his own retirement from the news station earlier this week.

The silver-haired 43-year old Cooper is frustrated over CNN’s low ratings, Hollywood news website reported, suggesting he is entertaining offers from other networks for when his contact expires next year.

Insiders said Cooper’s expensive, frequent trips to places like Haiti and the Gulf of Mexico had engendered “widespread resentment” among other employees.

Cooper is a frequent public face for CNN, and his image adorns much of their marketing efforts.

His 10 pm evening show frequently draws the least viewers among the three major news networks.

A CNN spokesperson called TheWrap.com report “meaningless conjecture.”

King said Tuesday he would end his nightly talk show on CNN in the fall, after a quarter century marked by high-profile interviews, and more recently by sagging ratings, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The New York Times reports on CNN”s ratings woes.

John King, one of CNN’s most valued correspondents, has seen the numbers for his 7 p.m. show tumble drastically from where CNN stood a year ago.

Lou Dobbs was the 7 p.m. host then, and his show became a flashpoint for criticism because of the some of the stands Mr. Dobbs took on issues like immigration.

John King took over the time slot in March with a news-oriented show that hews to CNN’s promise not to skew to either side of the political spectrum. But in the second quarter of the year, “John King USA” dropped more than 40 percent of the audience from the quarter a year earlier.

To be fair, CNN enjoyed an extraordinary ratings bump at the end of the second quarter last year because of the death of Michael Jackson. That pushed the numbers a year ago slightly higher.

This news cycle has included stories of high national interest, like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the firing of General Stanley A. McChrystal; but those do not bring CNN hordes of casual viewers like other stories have in recent years — the sudden death of Mr. Jackson being the last of those.

CNN’s management is not unaware of John King’s ratings issues — one senior executive privately expressed concern about the program as early as May. The show has demonstrated some growth over the past three months.

In April, he drew 109,000 viewers in the age group that most news advertisers buy, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54. In June he had pulled that number up to 162,000 – still well behind dominant numbers for Fox News’s “Fox Report” (down 12 percent) and more steady numbers for “Hardball” on MSNBC (down 8 percent).

The 7 p.m. ratings problem – though that hour serves as the lead-in to the prime-time shows — has not yet been widely discussed because CNN has had other fires to put out.

Is there any good news for CNN?

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