Fox News is still feeling the reverberations from yanking Tucker Carlson off the air.
The backlash is worse than Fox News anticipated.
And Fox News got smacked with this huge reality check about taking Tucker Carlson off the air.
When Fox News fired Carlson, left-wing pundits who cheered the news – as well as Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his corporate henchmen – smugly predicted that the network’s ratings would not take a hit because the true star is the “real estate” of hosting a show at 8PM on the number one rated cable news network in America.
Those predictions were badly misplaced.
By the third night after Carlson’s removal, Fox News ratings in the 8PM time slot plunged nearly 60 percent.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes even drew a bigger audience than the 8PM show on Fox, where establishment-friendly Republican Brian Kilmeade hosted in Carlson’s absence.
Mediaite reports:
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes won the 8 p.m. hour on cable news Wednesday night. Hayes’s win comes on the heels of Monday’s firing of Tucker Carlson — who long reigned during the hour.
Hayes beat Carlson’s temporary replacement, Brian Kilmeade, with 1.38 million total viewers to 1.33 million viewers.
Kilmeade’s two recent programs have struggled to retain all of Carlson’s audience in prime time. Where Carlson averaged 3.25 million total viewers and 443,000 viewers in the key 25-54 age demographic last quarter, Kilmeade’s Wednesday night show brought in only 1.7 million viewers and 149,000 demo viewers – which landed the network behind both CNN and MSNBC in the demo.
The audience Tucker Carlson built was younger than the typical Fox News audience because he would tackle topics like the COVID vaccine, federal involvement in January 6, how major institutions in America tried to force transgenderism on the population, and the recklessness of Joe Biden’s war with Russia in Ukraine.
Carlson’s audience does not want the sanitized, corporate-controlled establishment version of conservative news that Rupert Murdoch hopes to present in his absence.
It was also telling that a video Carlson posted to social media announcing that he was not going away while suggesting that Fox News fired him to censor his program drew over 21 million views on social media.
In today’s changing environment – where more Americans are cutting the cord and dropping the cable bundle – the brand is no longer the star.
The individual talent is now what drives an audience to a show.
And Fox News is learning that lesson the hard way.
Deplorable Daily will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
