RUTHFULLY YOURS

The cable television news channel ratings for the week of Monday through Friday June 5-9, 2017 are in and the news continues to be bad for the ailing Fox News Channel. According to TVNewser, which is part of adweek.com:

Rachel Maddow [on MSNBC] had the No. 1 show of the night [Friday June 9], and MSNBC won the week in Monday – Friday prime time among adults 25-54. Fox News remains on top of cable news in total viewers.

This is terrible news for the Fox News Channel which gradually started to lose its commanding 15 year long ratings lead after the firing of its most popular prime time host Bill O’Reilly on April 19. The post-O’Reilly schedule change at FNC – which moved the program The Five from 5 to 9 PM ET and Tucker Carlson from 9 to 8 PM – is proving to be a disaster, especially in the 9 o’clock hour as The Five is continuing to lose ground against the competition as time goes on.

On Friday, June 9, for example, Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC at 9 PM, bested The Five in the all-important 25-54 age group demographic by almost two to one: 647,000 to 370,000 viewers. In total viewers for that hour, Maddow and MSNBC also beat Fox News: 2,620,000 to 2,307,000 viewers. In past years, FNC wiped the floor with MSNBC in total viewers in almost every prime time hour because FNC’s viewers are on average a decade older than MSNBC’s, and older viewers, tending to be more conservative, have overwhelmingly gravitated to Fox News in the past.

That seems to be no longer the case. Overall, more people are tuning into cable news these days – presumably motivated by the unceasing attacks on the Trump Administration by MSNBC and CNN. This unmistakable wave of anti-Trump viewers is pumping up the numbers for MSNBC and, to an extent, CNN, both of which have emerged as frontline leaders in the “resist” Trump movement. Most likely, the ratings collapse of Fox News is accountable to both new anti-Trump viewers flocking to MSNBC and CNN while long time Fox News viewers, fed up with FNC’s obvious shift to the left, increasingly abandon the channel, either to seek other options for conservative news or to tune out altogether.

Last weekend’s cable news ratings will be available late Tuesday afternoon, and it will be interesting to see which of the three news channels triumphed on Saturday and Sunday, particularly with the second installment of Steve Hilton’s new weekly Fox News program on Sundays at 9 PM, The Next Revolution.