On "The Five," Juan Williams Brags That Fox is Gaining... Leftwing Viewers

Fox's ratings are stagnating while everyone else's, including Newsmax's, surge.

A leaked email reveals that Fox's management just started tracking another competitor's ratings -- Newsmax's, of course.

Newsmax's audience appears to have grown by a factor of five times in recent months.

The e-mail, from Fox's Market Research Manager to is addressed to: "R.Murdoch, L.Murdoch, Cavuto, Collins, Dorrego, Gambelli, Nallen, Petterson, Scott, Wallace."

Interesting to see who's on that list.

In the most desirable demographic, 25 to 54 year olds, aka "the almost 29 demographic," Fox takes 366,000 on average. CNN beats them with 477,000.

Newsmax, which until recently had merely tens of thousands of such viewers, now clocks in with 109,000.

That is genuine competition.

Newsmax is bragging that it's now beating Fox Business.

Fox News viewers appear to be deserting the network in droves as they tune into Newsmax TV.

Nielsen data confirms the trend in the post-election period last week.

During Wednesday through Friday last week, Newsmax TV led Fox Business and CNBC in all key day parts.

Newsmax is also seeing a terrific surge across its media properties, starting with its cable and satellite news channel. OTT viewership of the channel is also up on devices like Roku, YouTube, and Xumo.

The company also saw over a half million downloads to the free Newsmax TV APP, and earlier Tuesday hit the top 3 position in rankings for downloads on iPhone.

And traffic to Newsmax.com, the company's flagship website, also is surging.

Remember when I pointed out that Brian Stelter -- who does nothing but attack Fox News -- was now going easy on Fox, now that Fox has joined the left?

I guess he realized that that was a little too suspicious so now he's at least mentioned that Fox is losing viewers to Newsmax.

In his newsletter, at least. I don't know if he's mentioned this on CNN yet.

Fox's new challenger

President Trump's fans who don't think Fox News is right-wing enough have another option on cable and satellite: Newsmax TV.

And something dramatic has happened in the past week: A big audience has sought out Newsmax TV for the first time.

Those two facts are connected. Some Trump loyalists are raging against Fox and changing the channel to Newsmax instead. While Newsmax is still much smaller than Fox, this is the most robust right-wing TV challenge to Fox that I have ever seen.

Over the summer, when I started to keep an eye on Newsmax's Nielsen ratings, the channel was averaging about 25,000 viewers at any given time... In the final week of October, Newsmax was averaging just 65,000 viewers at any given time.

Then came the election. Newsmax averaged 182,000 viewers during the election week that ended on Sunday. And it is growing even more this week. On Monday the channel averaged 347,000 viewers. On Tuesday, 437,000 viewers. Evening shows like "Spicer & Co" and "Greg Kelly Reports" are reaching 700,000 and 800,000 viewers. These shows struggled to hit 100,000 before the election! Something has changed.

And while that's going on, Juan Williams, who's So Stupid It's Actually Racist (TM), decides it's a good time to brag that Fox is now attracting liberal viewers.

Yeah, we know, Juan. Oh boy, do we know.

Apparently, in addition to pandering to the left so that Lachlan Murdoch's socialite wife can feel more comfortable at cocktail parties, Fox News has another new hobby: stepping on its own dick until it's purple-black.

I think they need to spend more time in Messaging Strategy Sessions with their crisis communications PR firm.

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posted by Ace at 06:57 PM

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