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Do these tabloids actually do their research?
I looked at a Mirror article on the closedown earlier and they said the channel was “hugely popular”. It might have been back in the day but now only like, what, 2 people are actually watching it.

The tabloids hardly ever do, including this "article" from The Sun that said Cartoon Network in the UK closed in 2014. 
I guess they just read the automatically generated Q&A's Google gives out with search results, which are often wrong or out of context.

www.thesun.co.uk 

A lot of the people in the press (and public) that have nostalgia for CITV most likely watched it when it was an afternoon block on ITV and were already out of the channel's demographic by the time the channel launched. There seems to be very little thought about CITV's current output and what kids want to watch nowadays.

This Sky News article mentions Fraggle Rock, Fun House, Knightmare, Danger Mouse (Original), and Rainbow these shows aired on CITV several years before the channel even existed. news.sky.com