Following the firing of prime-time host Tucker Carlson last week, Fox News reportedly saw a significant decline in ratings in the 8 p.m. hour; however, one of its much smaller conservative cable rivals appears to have benefited, at least temporarily, from the viewer migration.
During his final week in that time slot, which was April 17–21, Carlson averaged more than 3 million viewers overall per night.
However, during the first four days of the week without him, the network averaged only about 1.8 million viewers per night.
Last week, Brian Kilmeade briefly covered the time slot; this week, Lawrence Jones, a Fox News star, will host.
The discrepancy was most obvious on Wednesday, when Kilmeade’s 8 p.m. hour averaged 1.3 million people overall as opposed to Carlson’s 3 million viewers from a week earlier, a loss of 56%.
The audience dip around 8 p.m. was called “a bloodbath” by former Fox personality Megyn Kelly.
Fox continues to dominate the competition on MSNBC and CNN.
Additionally, the network has previously survived brief declines of a similar nature, including a minor drop following the termination of Bill O’Reilly in 2017.
Carlson took his place, and in 2021 he had the most popular program on television news.
Another right-leaning cable news network saw an increase in viewers last week: Newsmax
A competitive 531,000 total viewers tuned in to Newsmax’s 8 p.m. broadcast on the day Carlson was fired, up five times over the previous week.
Eric Bolling, a former Fox News personality, hosted the show.
More recent numbers showed an even more bleak picture for the network.
In the first week without Tucker Carlson, Fox News Channel’s prime-time audience decreased by 29.6% from the prior week.
According to Nielsen’s live-plus-same-day data announced on Tuesday, Fox News Channel averaged 1.449 million viewers for its prime-time programming from April 24 and Sunday, ranking third among cable networks.
When the NFL draft was not being covered for two nights the previous week, it received an average of 2.058 million viewers.
Only three of the top 20 cable programs this week were on Fox News Channel.
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