Former President Donald Trump did not succeed in overturning his election loss to Joe Biden. But he did succeed during his lame-duck
period in knocking Fox News down a peg.To get more
late breaking news fox, you can visit shine news official website.
Over the past few months, Trump repeatedly derided Fox News while promoting upstart rivals like Newsmax and One America News Network
(OAN), both of which more reliably pushed his conspiracy theories about
the election being stolen. Fox News responded to this very public
post-Election Day rift with Trump — and the sagging ratings that came
with it — by purging its newsroom and doubling down on grievance-soaked
punditry.
For the first time in 20 years, Fox News can no longer say it’s the top-rated cable news network. In fact, from Election Day through Biden’s
inauguration, Fox not only didn’t finish on top — it also finished
behind both CNN and MSNBC in total viewers.
Inauguration Day was particularly grim for Rupert Murdoch’s news
network. Although it’s not necessarily surprising that Fox viewers
weren’t eager to watch the swearing-in of a Democratic president, Fox
News’s ratings were down a whopping 75 percent compared with
Inauguration Day 2017, as detailed by Daily Beast contributing editor
Justin Baragona (ratings for Biden’s inauguration across all news
networks were actually up overall):
Amid its ratings struggles, Fox News debuted a new weekday lineup last week that cut an hour of news content and replaced it with another
Hannity-style opinion show at 7 pm ET, which for now is hosted by a
rotating cast of Fox personalities. But ratings for the first week of
that show, hosted by Fox & Friends’s Brian Kilmeade, actually lagged
behind what Martha MacCallum’s old news-centric show was doing in the
same time slot.
As Baragona explained in an interview with Vox, it’s not a coincidence that Fox News’s ratings decline coincided with the
disappearance of Trump’s Twitter account, which the former president
used relentlessly to promote his favorite Fox opinion hosts and
denigrate their competition. And now, without the backing of one of its
most influential fans, the network has been left to chart its way
through an uncertain future.
“We don’t know how much right-wing grievances will work, how much basically stoking outrage will work,” Baragona said. “It worked during
the Obama years, and that’s the formula they’re trying to replicate
right now. But we just got through with a Trump era, and now the guy who
helped trumpet [and] amplify them on Twitter, he’s gone now. His
Twitter account’s gone. And many of his fans are not coming back, so it
just remains to be seen.”Coming as it did toward the end of a year in
which the station again finished as the most-watched cable news network,
Baragona characterized Election Day as a major “inflection point” for
Fox. By then, Trump had already made known his displeasure with Fox for
its failure to rig polls in his favor or to only interview Republicans
who supported him, though he still promoted Fox hosts who toed the line,
such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. But everything changed the
night Fox News infamously called Arizona for Biden.
Fox News’s Arizona call was early — competing cable news networks didn’t call the state until days later — but turned out to be accurate.
Nonetheless, it threw a major wrench in Trump’s barely concealed plan to
steal the election by prematurely declaring victory.
