Fox's Ratings Keep Getting Worse After Firing Tucker Carlson

Fox News continues to lose viewers as part of the fallout of firing Tucker Carlson, and Newsmax is reaping the benefits by watching their numbers go up. But a similar thing happened after the 2020 election, and the former Fox viewers that fled to Newsmax eventually found their way back. Could this time be different, or is there an actual shift taking place in conservative media that could be a bad omen for the entire industry? Farron Cousins answers these questions.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Fox News continues to hemorrhage viewers after their firing of Tucker Carlson this past month. And Newsmax seems to be reaping all the benefits from it. While Fox News's ratings are going down, Newsmax ratings are going up sometimes by two or 300%. Meanwhile, Fox's ratings have fallen by about 50%. But there's a word of caution here because this same thing happened by the way, right after the 2020 presidential election, specifically after Fox News called Arizona for President Biden. What happened at Fox was that they had a lot of viewers leave the network and they went over to newsmax. Most of them did, not all of them, but they went to newsmax. So newsmax from about November of 2020 to mid-December of 2020 saw a massive increase in the ratings where the ratings jumped up by about a hundred or 200% per night. And then by the end of December, right, a little after a month later, all those viewers left.

Newsmax was back down to like 200,000 viewers a night, and Fox News was back up to where it like to be. So we could be looking at a similar scenario right now, but I gotta tell you, even though Newsmax is of course experiencing, experiencing, excuse me, the so-called boom in viewership, the numbers don't quite add up, and the numbers tell us a different story. That isn't a good story for conservative media. Let me read this for you. From the Washington Post, Fox still maintains a large advantage over newsmax with an average of 1.6 million total viewers in primetime to Newsmax is 383,000, but it's lost more than half. Its usual 8:00 PM viewers through several weeks of temporary replacement hosts in the four weeks before Carlson's firing Eric Bowling, uh, who is their 8:00 PM host on newsmax, uh, bowling's Newsmax Show average 202,000 total viewers. Since Carlson was ousted, Newsmax has averaged 489,000 viewers according to Nielsen ratings.

Data obtained by the Washington Post Carlson show on Fox averaged 3.27 million in his last four weeks as a host. And the host, whoever placed him at 8:00 PM have averaged just 1.49 million viewers. Fox's overall primetime ratings have declined by 39% from an average of 2.6 million viewers to 1.6 million viewers. While Newsmax is primetime, ratings have increased by 135%. So here's the thing why I say the numbers don't add up. Fox News has lost a million viewers a night on average, and that's actually the most conservative number. They've lost a million viewers. Well, newsmax, according to those numbers I just read, you, has only gained 280,000 viewers. So we are somehow missing 720,000

Fox News viewers that didn't go to newsmax, right? They're not going over to one America. They're just possibly not watching conservative media. Now, that's the silver lining of this story. Could it be, could it be that these people finally just had enough of Fox, they got mad that he fired Tucker, and so we're not watching Fox anymore, but maybe after not consuming Fox News for a couple days, maybe they realized, wait a minute, these things aren't so bad. It's not so bad, not having to get off from the man in the TV every night telling me what to be off about. Now, that's a long shot. I'll give you that, and I'm not saying that is what happened, but I am saying that certain, I mean, over 700,000 viewers of Fox News left the network and did not go to a rival conservative network.

They didn't go anywhere except away from Fox. So where are those viewers? Are those people that are now reachable? Are those people who are possibly expanding their horizons, or are those people who at the very least, have just unplugged from Fox News and are no longer being fed that propaganda every single day? Because believe it or not, folks, that is important. It doesn't matter if they're out there, you know, consuming a different form of news, right? I don't think these people went to msn, bbc. They definitely didn't go to cnn. Nobody goes to cnn. But if at the very least they've stopped consuming propaganda, then that's a win.