Wait, wasn’t Fox Information alleged to be lifeless by now?
In April 2023, I learn the obituaries. The corporate was reeling from an enormous $787M defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Programs. It clumsily and inexplicably fired Tucker Carlson, the community’s prime star.
Rankings plummeted as conservative rival Newsmax pounced, tripling its viewership in Carlson’s timeslot. Fox shares took a success on Wall Road.
CNN’s Brian Stelter, who’s made a profession out of hating Fox, led the dance social gathering on Fox’s grave. He predicted that Tucker’s “sudden ouster can have profound penalties for Fox Information, for TV information and the Republican Occasion”.
Nicely, the results are in, and so they’re profound certainly: Fox is totally crushing it, and the GOP runs the nation.
Within the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Fox is as soon as once more totally dominating the cable information panorama. It averaged 1.57 million total-day viewers and a couple of.64 million primetime viewers final quarter, surpassing rankings for broadcast networks ABC and CBS. The highest 13 cable information exhibits? All Fox.
In the meantime, MSNBC and CNN have shed tons of of 1000’s of viewers, with MSNBC’s primetime viewers dropping 50% and CNN drawing solely 337,000 whole day viewers within the week after the election. Liberal viewers will lick their wounds and return, however Fox will nonetheless win for the foreseeable future.
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So what occurred? Math.
They’ve quite a lot of proficient folks at Fox who all deserve quite a lot of credit score, beginning with Rupert Murdoch’s billion-dollar guess, and Roger Ailes’ genius in constructing the community from scratch. However beneath all of it lies a easy actuality: Fox is the lone conservative voice in a polarized tv panorama. That’s an unbeatable structural benefit.
Image a city cut up between steak lovers and BBQ aficionados. Loads of steakhouses, however only one BBQ joint. The place do you assume the crowds will likely be? The actual shock is that rivals haven’t emerged.
However that’s precisely what occurs with conservative cable information, the place Fox has a digital monopoly. Sure, Newsmax exists, however after a decade, it nonetheless produces mediocre tv and even much less spectacular journalism. It briefly spiked when Carlson departed, however couldn’t maintain that momentum, and Fox recovered within the rankings by that summer time.
Zoom out to the broader media panorama, and the ideological imbalance is even starker. Community information exhibits have gone past mere liberal bias into overt hostility towards conservative views. However these tens of tens of millions of conservative eyeballs need to go someplace. Fox offers it.
In 2024, Trump was an everyday on the community, and even their sit-down with Kamala Harris shattered data. That drew over 10 million viewers throughout a number of airings, the very best rated non-primetime cable information interview ever.
So regardless of the 2023 drama, Fox emerges as a kingmaker as soon as extra. Trapped in a declining cable enterprise, despised by half the nation, the community nonetheless stays the preeminent platform for conservative politicians and concepts on tv.
The partisans will maintain raging, however the numbers inform the actual story. Betting towards Fox Information continues to be a dropping proposition.
Ken LaCorte writes about censorship, media malfeasance, uncomfortable questions, and trustworthy perception for folks curious how the world actually works. Comply with Ken on Substack
