Fox News' Daytime Ratings Fall 32%

From the Washington Times, on last Tuesday, the 24th:

Fox's daytime viewership dropped 32 percent from the two weeks prior to Election Day to the two weeks after, the Nielsen company said.

The post-election, weekday average daytime viewership of 1.63 million was roughly equivalent to that of CNN (1.68 million) and MSNBC (1.71 million). CNN was up 33% and MSNBC up 9% during that time period, Nielsen said.

It's not unusual for a cable news network popular with fans of a certain candidate to see its audience to drop off when that candidate loses; MSNBC's ratings briefly collapsed four years ago when Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The difference here is that Trump has been actively encouraging his followers to abandon Fox and hasn't actually conceded. Newsmax, the conservative network that Trump has been touting, saw its daytime average viewership jump from 88,000 the two weeks prior to the election to 474,000 the two weeks after, Nielsen said.

That ratings gain by Newsmax is a bit less than the ratings lost by Fox.

So conservatives are still engaged with the news -- they're just disengaging from Fox.

Meanwhile, a repost. I posted this on Thanksgiving. Some might have missed it.

Fox News is now threatening guests who appear on Newsmax, telling them they won't be invited on Fox.

They're also branding their own viewers, and former viewers, "fringe," "far right," and "radicalized."

CNN link. I wouldn't click. This article is by CNN's Chief Deplatforming Officer Tater, with additional reporting by their Senior Deplatforming Associate Oliver Darcy. It claims that all of Newsmax's gains are due to "conspiracy theories," because, of course.

Anything Tater doesn't like is a "conspiracy theory."

Except Russia Collusion, of course!

Fox News is taking action to stave off newfound competition from Newsmax TV.

Producers on some Fox programs have been told to monitor Newsmax's guest bookings and throw some sand in Newsmax's gears by encouraging guests who appear on both channels to stop saying yes to the upstart.

According to Fox sources, producers were told to avoid some regular guests if they kept showing up on Newsmax after being encouraged to stop. Management's goal: to remind guests who's boss in the right-wing media world.

Fox News denies this. But they're lying.

Memo to Fox: When you threaten people, they tend to talk about it.

To everyone.

...

Fox hosts and producers are on edge about the ratings race, a number of staffers told CNN Business. The staffers also said that the competitive dynamic is having an impact on some of Fox's programming choices.

...

Sources at Fox derided Newsmax as "far-right" and "fringe" and they singled out Kelly for particular criticism. But there has been a noticeable shift in the way they talk about Newsmax.

Conservatives who attempt to delegitimize other conservatives as "far right" and "fringe" are not conservatives. They are liberals.

...

If history is any guide, the audience will gradually "come home," in the words of one Fox executive, who pointed out that the network remains dominant among conservative viewers.

I mentioned a source telling me that that was what Fox was telling itself.

Now they call their own audience "radicalized."

...

"Our audience has absolutely been radicalized," one longtime on-air staffer at Fox said.

"Far right." "Fringe."

"Radicalized."

How is the way that Fox talks about its audience any different from how CNN talks about Fox's audience?

Now comes Fox's pitiful attempts to appease its "radicalized," "far right," "fringe" audience:

Multiple staffers pointed to programming adjustments, like the airing of Mark Levin's right-wing talk show on both Saturday and Sunday nights, that are meant to appeal to the Fox base. Levin's show used to air just on Sundays. Last Saturday, however, Fox aired a six-day-old episode of the show, full of out-of-date claims about Trump's legal challenges.

The staffers said the frequent re-airing of clips from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" during the day was another noticeable attempt to appease viewers.

They're airing Tucker Carlson tips during the day to Con the Rubes so that neoliberals and plain old liberals Paul Ryan, Chris Wallace, Chris Stirewalt, and Bill Sammon can keep their jobs.

By the way, the Fox staffers who talked to Tater savaged Maria Bartiromo as a lunatic conspiracy theorists.

They hate you just as much.

posted by Ace at 04:13 PM

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