During her Friday podcast, SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly updated her listeners and viewers with some staggeringly bad news for the Fox News Channel in the wake of its firing of star host Tucker Carlson.
Kelly, herself a former Fox star, said that by the end of this week, the network was only “left with about a third of their audience.”
“I mean, that’s stunning,” she said.
She’s not kidding. Worse, the network killed its cash cow daypart.
Prime time programming, which is the network’s main source of revenue, has been decimated by the ratings decline. Hannity, the 9 p.m. show that follows Tucker Carlson, is down “almost 40%, down 39%, in the 10 p.m… down 24% in the demo, down almost 20% in the total, and I could go on,” Kelly said.
Even the 11 p.m. hour, which features late-night comedy show host Greg Gutfeld, has taken a hit.
According to Kelly, prime-time programming is “all anyone gives a sh*t about over there at Fox News. The prime time pays the bills, period. They’re all down.”
According to Kelly’s evaluation of the network’s ratings, Fox News, which has always boasted of its supremacy in the cable news sector, has suffered a significant setback.
Furthermore, the network’s defeats to MSNBC have sparked apprehension about its prospects. Kelly observes that “they have lost repeatedly to MSNBC,” and this trend is troubling.
After Carlson left, the channel’s supremacy appeared to be in jeopardy as “Fox News Tonight” witnessed a sudden decline of almost one million viewers. None of Fox’s programs were able to attain the 3 million viewer threshold that Carlson had consistently maintained. Even Rachel Maddow’s 9 pm program surpassed Carlson’s former 8 pm time slot at Fox in terms of viewership.
“As Fox News struggles to find a way to reverse its fortunes, it remains to be seen what the future holds for the network. But one thing is clear: they’ll need to make some major changes if they hope to hold their position as the top-rated cable news network in the country,” Trending Politics noted.
WATCH:
Here's @megynkelly on the genuinely remarkable, instant collapse of Fox's ratings in the wake of its decision to fire the most popular host in the history of the medium:pic.twitter.com/pJgewdxmlG
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 5, 2023