Now We Know: Ingraham's Ratings Exploded After Hogg Fight
After Laura Ingraham’s run-in with Parkland anti-gun activist David Hogg, the consensus was that the Fox News host was done. She was the next Bill O’Reilly. She might as well have just packed up her bags and left Fox News headquarters in disgrace.
Here were the headlines:
“David Hogg’s call for a boycott of Laura Ingraham is in the best tradition of democracy” — Los Angeles Times.
“Laura Ingraham Got Outsmarted By a High School Senior” — Spin
“Readers on David Hogg, Laura Ingraham: Americans are sick and tired of bullies” — USA Today
Ouch. For those of you with short memories, Ingraham made an inadvisable but generally harmless remark about Hogg not getting into certain colleges. She apologized, Hogg rejected the apology and called for an advertiser boycott, which netted a few takers.
So, after she returned to the air after a scheduled vacation for Easter, you can bet that her ratings plummeted like a rock and she was … oh wait, actually, she was the number one show in her cable news time slot right off the bat, beating Embalmed-American host Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC and CNN’s unintentionally-hilarious Don Lemon.
Well, clearly, that wasn’t going to last. Right?
“Fox News host Laura Ingraham has lost advertisers, but she’s gained ratings: Last week she earned her best ever,” The Wrap reported on April 16.
They also noted that “in her return to the airwaves last week, she was up 25 percent in total viewers and 36 percent in the key 25-54 demo, compared to her averages for the first three months of the year.”
“She averaged 3,099,000 total viewers and 685,000 in the 25-54 demo. The numbers included a bump in viewership for Friday’s coverage of the airstrikes on Syria, which also improved ratings for her competition at MSNBC and CNN. Ingraham beat both networks in total viewers and the demo last week.”
Well, that was April 16. Surely she’s dropped off since then.
The answer is, a little, but her competition has dropped off more. According to TV Newser, on Monday she had 2.7 million viewers and on Wednesday she had 2.5 million viewers. That’s significantly higher than her closest competition, the cadaverous Mr. O’Donnell, who had 2.3 million viewers on both nights. Don Lemon was nowhere near those numbers either night, which is completely explicable.
O’Donnell was much closer to Ingraham during her first week back.
This is the crazy, media-created alternate reality that we half-inhabit. We’re told that Laura Ingraham is on her way out — America doesn’t like bullies, the boycott is a great American tradition, she got her conservative butt handed to her by a high schooler, that sort of thing.
And then you have the ratings, which represent actual reality. It reflects what people really think and really want to watch.
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