"A&E Has Lost Half Its Viewers Since Dropping ‘Live PD’/Network’s prime-time viewership was up 4% this year before it canceled its hit police reality show..."

"... Nielsen data show.... The show, which follows police on their rounds in multiple cities simultaneously, averaged about 1.9 million viewers for its Friday and Saturday night episodes, repeatedly re-aired on other days. It spawned several successful spinoff shows, also canceled. A&E, co-owned by the Walt Disney Co. DIS -0.43% and Hearst Corp., dropped 'Live PD' in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.... The network said it has always been able to 'find new hits and reinvent ourselves.... In the entertainment industry, Mr. Floyd’s death has led to discussions about the role television and movies play in shaping perceptions of law enforcement and whether portrayals of police have been too one-sided and have failed to address concerns about excessive force and bad policing.... The franchise’s fan base—the self-dubbed “Live PD Nation”—has been very active on social media, encouraging a boycott of the network until the programs are returned, which A&E hasn’t ruled out."

The WSJ reports (and I didn't hit a paywall).

Here's a crazy idea for A&E: Arts & Entertainment. I remember when it would air entire ballets and operas and only go as low as to show British mystery shows like "Agatha Christie's Poirot" and "Sherlock Holmes," its own documentary series "Biography," and "An Evening at the Improv."

The top-rated comment at the Wall Street Journal is: "Go Woke, Go Broke. Enough Said. Back the Blue." Second highest-rated: "The poor things at A&E have lost money because they decided to virtue signal? Somehow, I don't feel sorry for them."

Here's an article from Vulture, last June: "Cops and Live PD Are Finally Gone. What Took So Long?"

Both shows have long been subject to significant criticism over their glorification of police officers, distortion of realities surrounding American policing, and ethically questionable relationships with law enforcement. Most recently, these controversies were the subject of a spectacular podcast, Running From Cops, which embarked on a robust investigation into the rise, legacy, and dubious nature of Cops and copycat shows like Live PD....

"For Cops, we spent 18 months going over 876 episodes and doing a huge data analysis on what it’s showing viewers, so this isn’t an opinion. These are facts. It presents a world that’s much more violent than it actually is. It presents police departments to be much more successful than they really are. It misrepresents crime by people of color. We also found that it coerces the people to be on the show by either forcing them to sign releases when they didn’t want to or by getting them to sign releases when they are drunk or high, which are states by which they have no business signing a legal document. There are also instances of the show putting people on the air without any sign-off whatsoever, which is what several people told us. But perhaps the biggest problem is that the cops control the message. With Cops, it’s contractually stipulated that the police departments can change anything they want in the show. It’s literally propaganda when it gets to that level.

It’s a similar situation with Live PD. The success of Live PD depends 100 percent on the participation of the police departments that are on it. This is not a situation where the show goes to the police for information and then leaves and says whatever they want about it. They’re making the police officers in these departments celebrities. And you can’t piss off the celebrities on your show. They can’t present anything potentially bad at these police departments, because then they won’t want to participate. So it becomes this endless cycle of having to present the police in a certain way for financial and ratings reasons, even if it’s not true....