When it comes to the landscape of cable news, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Fox News remained the dominant force in prime-time cable news ratings even after the seismic change of getting rid of star host Tucker Carlson, the network announced Tuesday.
And its liberal competitors combined are barely even close.
According to Fox, the network averaged 2.1 million viewers for its 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET lineup for the week of July 17-21 as hosts Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld easily outdrew the competition.
The lefty MSNBC, by contrast, averaged 1.4 million viewers while the ever-pathetic CNN drew only 594,000.
It’s almost enough to make an honest observer think there’s a market for a conservative take on the news in a country dominated by establishment media outlets that function more as a propaganda arm for the Democratic administration than honest purveyors of fact.
Fox News’s New Primetime Lineup Beats CNN, MSNBC in Ratings https://t.co/oeqgKLrYxV
— Martha MacCallum (@marthamaccallum) July 26, 2023
According to the media website The Wrap, the Fox numbers meant a 24 percent increase in viewers overall with the new lineup over the transition period that started April 24 when the network shocked the world, and its conservative fan base, by unceremoniously (and unconscionably) getting rid of Carlson.
“From April 24 to July 14 of this year, the network averaged 1.96 million total viewers, according to Nielsen-live-plus-same-day figures,” the Wrap reported.
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That doesn’t mean conservatives have forgiven Fox for its treatment of Carlson, of course. But the News Corp. suits who made that decision — for whatever reason they made it — are not the same as the names and personalities of Fox hosts that have spent careers growing the trust of Americans on the right.
And any man or woman with a reasonable command of the English language understands that there’s going to be a straighter story coming from pretty much any Fox network host than can be expected from the establishment media.
That doesn’t mean the network’s personalities don’t stumble in a way Carlson probably never would. It doesn’t mean competitors on the right, like Newsmax, won’t gain from Fox’s loss.
But it does mean that even if the production company isn’t respected anymore, its product is.
Meanwhile, Carlson’s viewers haven’t abandoned the former Fox host, whose “Tucker on Twitter” episodes are wracking up views in the millions or tens of millions.
In a time when the corruption of Washington’s swamp demands a public airing, Fox is basically the only network that appears interested in running news about, oh, say, Hunter Biden running bag for the Biden crime family while bragging about the influence over his father he was selling to foreigners.
The country’s top “news” institutions aren’t going to be reporting on that. The same national media that brought blanket coverage of Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 committee investigation to the American public are largely turning a blind eye to the revelations of House Republicans investigating the first family.
(It’s going to be interesting to see how the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal plays out in the establishment media’s coverage — given how little coverage the case has generated compared to its importance.)
But with or without Carlson, Fox is paying attention to news that counts — like the very real possibility that the president of the United States is compromised by foreign powers for his money-grubbing activities as vice president in the last Democratic administration.
Americans who watch Fox understand that — and they understand why they’re largely sticking with a network that seemingly betrayed them so badly when it came to Tucker Carlson.
The only real question is whether Fox’s executives really understand it, too.
