At this point it just feels like folks are tolerating them… and after the Tucker fiasco, even that’s running thin.
PJ Media reported that ”young people have abandoned Fox News in primetime,” according to the latest numbers surmised by A Newsman on Twitter.
How bad is it, really?
Tucker Carlson had 270,000 viewers in the 25-to-54-year-old demo on his last night at Fox News and the top-rated cable news show. One week later, his (temporary?) replacement, Fox News Tonight, had just 110,000 demo viewers and had dropped to 16th place. The numbers got worse as the week dragged on for the once-mighty 8 p.m. Fox time slot.
But wait, as the TV pitchman used to say, there’s more!
Sean Hannity has apparently been relying bigly on Carlson’s lead-in audience for his 9 p.m. show. “Hannity now below 100k in the demo,” warned A Newsman, “and Tucker’s old time slot losing more than 70% of its young audience. Catastrophic.”
Ratings rebounded somewhat on Monday and Tuesday after Friday night’s NFL draft pulled eyeballs away from their (formerly?) favorite cable news shows. But they didn’t rebound high enough to avoid this embarrassing headline: Cable News Ratings Monday, May 1: MSNBC Tops Fox News in Prime Time.
Ouch.
The ratings don’t tell the real story of Fox’s troubles, however. The Five and Gutfeld! are still doing great, MSNBC’s appeal remains focused entirely on hard lefties, and CNN has been a zombie news network for years. Maybe they should rebrand as ZNN.
Let’s hope it keeps up. Fox News is poised to give Jesse Watters the 8:00 pm spot, according to insider rumors, and he’s a MAGA favorite, so we’ll see if Trump supporters can keep up the boycott.
Hate to see Jesse go down, but Fox News has to pay for their disloyalty.
