More Than a Million Viewers Stopped Watching Fox News After Tucker’s Ouster. Where Did They Go?
In the weeks since Tucker Carlson’s firing in late April, Fox News’s prime time numbers have dropped significantly. While the audience flight is undeniable, the question of where those viewers went remains an open one.
Newsmax, Fox’s rightward competitor, has seen a boost since Carlson’s abrupt firing, especially at 8 p.m. – Carlson’s old time slot. Yet Newsmax’s increase doesn’t come close to accounting for the million viewers Fox has shed in prime time since firing Carlson.
Carlson’s final show was on Friday, April 21st and his ouster was announced on Monday the 24th. Carlson was on a ratings hot streak ahead of his firing, having dethroned The Five as the top show on cable news for the month of March.
In the four weeks prior to Carlson leaving the network, the prime time hours on Fox News (8 to 11 p.m.) averaged 2.6 million total viewers. In the four weeks since his ouster, prime time is down to just 1.6 million total viewers, a drop of some 39 percent.
Carlson’s hour has lost even more viewers. For the same period, Carlson’s 8 p.m. hour brought in 3.27 million total average viewers, which is now down to only 1.49 million total average viewers. Carlson’s hour has been replaced by a series of weekly rotating hosts beginning with Brian Kilmeade and now occupied by Trey Gowdy.
Newsmax’s Eric Bolling, formerly a Fox host, benefited the most from Carlson’s exit and has seen his daily viewer average increase from 202,000 viewers to 489,000 – comparing the four weeks before and after. In prime time, Newsmax is now averaging 383,000 viewers, which is up 135 percent since Carlson’s firing — according to some number crunching from the Washington Post.
Newsmax’s surge has led to the network beating CNN on multiple occasions in recent weeks, including Bolling topping Anderson Cooper three nights in a row in mid-May. Bolling’s wins, however, are just as much a sign of Newsmax’s increased viewership as it is of CNN’s slipping ratings as fallout from the Trump town hall continues to linger in the media.
While Newsmax is up over 100,000 average prime time viewers, that is only a fraction of the million prime time viewers Fox News has yet to regain and those viewers certainly haven’t switched over to CNN – and are very unlikely to be on MSNBC, which is the only network feeling good about its ratings at the moment.
Furthermore, Bolling gaining some 280,000 more average viewers in no way accounts for the more than 1.8 million average viewers who have left Fox at 8 p.m. with Carlson. So, the question Fox News must ask itself, a question many a cable news industry executive must ask themselves, is have those viewers simply tuned out for good? Or is there a way to bring them back?
