Tucker Carlson's Fox Firing Becomes Huge Gift for Conservative Network as It Sees Surge in Ratings
While his firing from Fox News may yet be a good thing for Tucker Carlson’s future, it has for sure been a boon to one of Fox’s rival cable networks, according to the latest viewership data.
Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April even though he was the network’s ratings king, has since gone on to notable things such as a massive interview with controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate, as well as a high-profile role as the host of a forum for most of the top 2024 GOP candidates for president.
Carlson’s fans may well have felt betrayed by Fox, but being fired does not seem to have hurt Carlson at all if the millions of views his Twitter videos have earned are any indication.
Fox seems to have benefited far less.
“Less than a week after Carlson was ousted, Fox News saw a catastrophic drop to just 1.3 million viewers — a 59% drop from Carlson’s average rating,” Newsmax reported.
But, speaking of Newsmax, there is another recipient of good news in connection with Carlson’s release from Fox.
Cable news network Newsmax has apparently been enjoying a huge upswing in viewers since Carlson’s exit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
“Newsmax drew 247,000 prime-time viewers in the period, through June 25, compared with 111,000 in the first quarter,” the Journal reported.
Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax’s chief executive, confirmed that the upswing coincides with Carlson’s exit at Fox. “We definitely saw a dramatic increase after Tucker,” he said, adding, “The departure obviously jolted a lot of his strong supporters.”
The benefit to Newsmax, which quickly moved to offer Carlson a job, showed up almost immediately, according to the data.
Newsmax’s viewership immediately surged to 334,000 during the last week of April on the tail of Carlson’s release from Fox. And while ratings have decreased slightly since that surge, Newmax is still enjoying above-average numbers.
In fact, Newsmax has seen higher average ratings than it did during the 2020 election when conservative views were angered by Fox’s election coverage. That 2020 ratings bump subsided, the Journal added. But this post-Carlson bump may be different.
Meanwhile, Fox’s ratings are still tumbling since Carlson’s abrupt exit.
“Newsmax’s surge has corresponded with a decline in Fox News’s prime-time ratings following Carlson’s exit. The network’s ratings declined 22% in the second quarter, to about 1.7 million prime-time viewers, though it remains the most-watched cable news network,” the Journal reported.
Ruddy founded Newsmax as a conservative news website in 1998 and by 2014 he expanded the site to a daily cable news network. But his network became a target of the suspected corrupt electronic voting machine manufacturers Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic over accusations that Newsmax said the companies rigged the 2020 election for now President Joe Biden.
Ruddy, though, disputes the contention and says that his network frequently took pains to note that there was no evidence that the voting software was manipulated to push Biden into the White House.
Whatever the benefits to Newsmax, so far Fox News has found nothing but falling ratings since it fired Carlson. Even Sean Hannity has seen a loss of viewers since Carlson left the network, falling from more than two million a night to only 1.7 million in July.
Fox News lost 32 percent of its prime-time viewers, 58 percent of viewers in the prime age demographic, 21 percent in daytime viewers, and 41 percent in total day demographic viewers compared to the week of July 11, 2022, according to TV Newser.
As a result of all this, Fox News suffered a downgrade of its stock because of its poor ratings.
Fox is still well below where it stood in the ratings before it fired Carlson. And it doesn’t look like it is going to recover too quickly if at all.
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