Fox News bottoms out
After Tucker Carlson’s firing and a multibillion dollar lawsuit against Fox News, a whole lot of doubters on our side said that the network would get away with it all, no matter what. This was largely what the mentality of the insiders at Fox News was – that they were hoping they could just paper over the mass firings of those who willingly lied about the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump, but getting the network to physically disappear from our cable boxes or streaming devices is a considerably arduous process that would take time.
Fox News is facing another sizable lawsuit at the present, but all that matters to the top executives at the network is that their programming remains viable for ratings.
Although the network remains at the top, their ratings have continued to spiral downward in the weeks since Carlson was fired – and they’re at a fairly noticeable decline. Before Carlson was fired, the network was hemorrhaging an average of 30% of viewers per week among their target audience: viewers between the ages of 25-54. Now, that decline is sharply dropping to 45%, with Fox News just barely edging out MSNBC in ratings.
This suggests that the problem isn’t so much their pundits, but their overall approach to journalism is terrible – not just for integrity, but business as well – and other networks shouldn’t try to emulate it the way CNN did. It also shows that Fox News still has a long way to fall and things are liable to only get worse for them as Donald Trump’s legal troubles continue to pile up.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making