Fox News Ratings Crater, Trailing CNN and MSNBC for First Time in 21 Years
Evan James
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Recent data from Nielsen shows that Fox News finished behind both CNN and MSNBC in ratings to open the month of January.
This is the first time in twenty-one years that that has happened, according to Daily Wire.
Nielsen’s ratings data shows that CNN finished number one among cable news networks with approximately 2.8 million viewers per day from January 4 through January 10, including 4.2 million in primetime.
MSNBC came in second with 2.3 million viewers per day and 3.8 million in primetime. And in third was Fox News with 1.7 million viewers per day and 3.2 million in primetime.
This is tough data for the conservative-leaning network. Over the past couple decades Fox has become accustomed to completely dominating the ratings, oftentimes receiving more viewership than CNN and MSNBC combined. Several factors contribute to the fall of Fox, including but not limited to:
- The death of Roger Ailes in 2017 and subsequent changes in network leadership
- Their disastrous Election Night coverage on November 3
- Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden
- An ostensible effort to distance themselves from Trump
- A real or perceived softening of their conservatism in general
- Trump’s public irritation with the network, to the point of telling people to migrate over to Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN)
Fox News has recently announced lineup changes as well. This is standard practice in the cable news industry and may not have much to do with their suffering ratings, though there’s a likely possibility that it does. Fox will be adding an hour-long opinion show in place of Martha MacCallum’s news show “The Story,” which had fallen behind both CNN and MSNBC’s 7pm timeslots after a stretch of being “comfortably ahead in ratings.” The network will also shuffle some of their daytime lineup.
As Joe Biden works through his first 100 days as president, it will be interesting to see how Fox News continues to perform, not only in comparison with CNN and MSNBC, but also with OANN and Newsmax.
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