Fox News Crushes Cable Competition

72%

Associated Press: “After election night through Dec. 13, the prime-time viewership of MSNBC was an average of 620,000, down 54% from the pre-election audience this year, the Nielsen company said. For the same time comparison, CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers was down 45%. … At Fox News Channel, a favorite news network for Trump fans, the post-election average of 2.68 million viewers is up 13%, Nielsen said. Since the election, 72% of the people watching one of those three cable networks in the evening were watching Fox News, compared to 53% prior to election day.”

In Wake of Trump Victory, Fox News Audience Grows

75%

“Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has captured nearly three-quarters of all US cable news audiences in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory, as liberal Americans tune out of the former reality star’s transition to a second term in office,” the Financial Times reports. “Fox’s daily audiences have surged 40 percent since the November 5 vote, while viewership of the more left-leaning MSNBC and CNN have dropped 38 percent and 27 percent respectively, according to Nielsen figures.”

CNN, Fox Hit New Viewership Lows Since Town Hall, Tucker Firing

429,000

“Last week, the cable news pioneer suffered its lowest-rated week since June 2015, averaging just 429,000 total daily viewers from Monday-Friday,” reports the Daily Beast’s Confider. “CNN was also down double digits compared to the same week last year in both total viewership and in the key advertising demographic of viewers ages 25-54. MSNBC more than doubled CNN’s daily audience, drawing 976,000 total viewers, while Fox News averaged 1.4 million. MSNBC was up more than 20 percent in both total and demo viewership metrics for Monday-Friday. Fox News was down 41 percent in the key demo year-to-year and 24 percent in total viewers, having seen its ratings plummet as angry right-wingers flee after Tucker Carlson’s shock firing. In fact, Fox’s post-Tucker weekday demo audience is the lowest its been since the first week of September 2001.”

Fox News CEO: Fact-Checking Trump Is ‘Bad for Business’

“This has to stop now. This is bad for business and there is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

— Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott in an email to Meade Cooper, executive vice president of prime time programming, regarding correspondent Eric Shawn fact-checking then-President Donald Trump’s lies after the 2020 election, reports CNN.

Dominion Voting Systems Legal Filings Show Fox TV Hosts Knew They Were Lying to Viewers

Liars: Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham
Liars: Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham

Heather Cox Richardson: “A legal filing today in the case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox News Corporation provides a window into the role of disinformation and money in the movement to deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

“Dominion Voting Systems is suing FNC for defamation after FNC personalities repeatedly claimed that the company’s voting machines had corrupted the final tallies in the 2020 election. The filing today shows that those same personalities didn’t believe what they were telling their viewers, and suggests that they made those groundless accusations because they worried their viewers were abandoning them to go to channels that told them what they wanted to hear: that Trump had won the election….

“The filing says that not a single witness from FNC testified they believed any of the allegations they were making about Dominion”

Tucker Carlson Resorts to Fascist Propaganda on Fox

Baltimore Sun opinion writer: “If not the theme of [Fox News fascist propagandist Tucker] Carlson’s week of broadcasts from Hungary, then the leitmotif was: Look at what a ‘happy’ and ‘orderly’ country Hungary is under Mr. Orbán, as opposed to the chaos and darkness of American life under Mr. Biden. We need someone like Mr. Orbán to lead America out of that darkness. And who would that someone be but Mr. Trump, who was described as a ‘great friend of Hungary’ by the Hungarian leader in an interview with Mr. Carlson last week.”