Based on the numbers from the first televised hearing of the January 6 House Select Committee, it appears that Fox News dropped the ball in a big way and got destroyed in the ratings.
According to the New York Times, at least 20 million viewers tuned in to watch the hearings. Only 3 million opted for Fox, which deliberately avoided televising the historic event:
An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.
ABC attracted the biggest audience, with 5.2 million viewers. NBC and CBS each had an audience of more than three million. MSNBC averaged more than four million, and CNN drew 2.7 million. (The 20 million figure did not yet include PBS, so the total audience was most likely a bit bigger.)
MSNBC did especially well compared to Fox:
MSNBC averaged a whopping (for them) 4.161 million total viewers, trouncing both Fox News (2.957 million total viewers) by 29 percent and CNN (2.617 total million viewers) by 37 percent. CNN finished way ahead of its direct cable news competition in the key demographic for news programming, adults 25-54, with 709,000 viewers from that age range vs. 555,000 on MSNBC and 513,000 on Fox. That’s a 22 percent advantage over MSNBC and 28 percent win over Fox News.
The three Fox hosts who provided anti-coverage and criticism of the hearings — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — saw their numbers crater, which is bad news for the conservative network with more public hearings on the way in the weeks ahead.
Once again, Fox would rather lose tens of millions of viewers than air the truth. It’s one of many reasons they should remove the word “news” from their propaganda network.
