Fox News continues to swirl around the drain as viewers depart the once-dominant cable news platform. Firing Tucker Carlson now looks even more like a desperate ploy to meddle in the 2024 election. The network took him off the air a few weeks ago, but now he’s back on a different platform—Twitter. This is happening right as Fox News is posting some of the lowest ratings it’s seen in many years. MSNBC is now towering over the Fox News lineup that no longer has Carlson.
For the first time in decades, MSNBC beat the entire primetime lineup on Fox News. A few weeks ago, Hannity was still hanging in there. But now even his numbers have dwindled as the last vestiges of Carlson’s followers have abandoned the network. Not that Fox News hasn’t been abandoning its own conservative audience already for years. Has Brett Baier called the 2024 election for Arizona yet, by the way?
With Rachel Maddow in the prime spot, MSNBC drew in a comfortable 1.85 million average viewers for the entire evening. The losers at Fox only drew 1.72 million. That’s a disaster for Fox. Tucker was averaging anywhere from 3.4 to 4 million viewers per night, and the rest of Fox’s lineup was greatly benefiting from his viewership numbers. Sean Hannity stopped being interesting years ago, but he was still drawing big numbers because people would just leave their televisions on after Tucker went off the air.
The bleeding is so bad that on Monday night, even CNN beat Fox News in the coveted 25-54 demographic during Tucker’s old time slot. Frankly, Fox had this coming.
A lot of the station’s viewers have had battered wife syndrome for years. Fox News is terrible, but at least they weren’t 100% terrible. Tucker’s program was a must-watch hour for millions of Americans every night. At least Fox News still had him! Now there’s no reason to stick around and give them any viewership numbers.
Carlson, of course, came roaring back this week. He launched a new show, “Tucker on Twitter,” and it’s drawing tons of viral attention already. Two episodes have aired so far, and Fox News is already threatening legal action.
Episode 1 aired on Tuesday, and it has drawn more than 100 million impressions so far. After Fox threatened to sue him, Tucker hilariously posted episode number 2. These are obviously just test runs and equipment checks so far, but he’s already putting up amazing numbers in his first two monologues.
All radio and television personalities operate with a non-compete clause of some sort while they’re under contract with one station so that another station can’t poach them—at least not cheaply. Fox News had planned to just keep paying Tucker Carlson until his contract expires in 2025 to sideline him through the next presidential election. With his non-compete clause in place, and because he’s still under contract, Tucker can’t simply walk over to another station and get a job.
Fortunately for the rest of us, his contract says nothing about his social media channels. Those predate his time at Fox, and they’re his personal channels. It seems like Tucker and his lawyers have found a way to avoid being silenced for the next two years, although we’ll see if Elon Musk upholds his promise to keep Twitter a free speech platform.
In the meantime, we highly recommend that you check out Tucker’s new program. Now that he’s off the leash, he’s obviously going to be more dangerous than ever to our smarmy elites. You can find his Twitter profile at:
