Along with so much else, Donald Trump’s presidency has had a dramatic impact on many Americans’ choice of news sources, particularly Fox News.
Fox was once Trump’s most-favored news channel, but that’s changed — and since the November election, Fox is faltering, reports Vanity Fair.
Long the dominant cable news source, Fox is now being challenged from from the left-of-center by CNN, and from the right by the conservative channel Newsmax and the even more right-wing One America News.
Trump’s election defeat “has upended America’s news landscape, cementing a parallel universe on the right where even Fox News isn’t Trumpy enough for millions of his diehards,” reports Axios.
Fox remains number-one among cable channels in prime time.
But since Election Day, CNN has consistently topped Fox in the Nielsen ratings for the first time since the weeks following the 9/11 terror attacks.
“Between Nov. 4 and Sunday, CNN has averaged 1.73 million viewers, more than double a year ago,” the Associated Press reports, citing Nielsen, and adding that Fox News had 1.56 million and MSNBC was right behind with 1.53 million.
“Fox is at once not radical enough for Trump loyalists on the right but too much a cult of denial for people who want to take the Biden administration seriously,” Vanity Fair says.
The magazine adds that while some Fox news anchors offer “moments of forced reality,” partisan prime-time hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs “are still holding out for a Trump win and fanning the flames of the president’s baseless election-theft claims.”
But Newsmax takes it even further: on Tuesday night, Greg Kelly opened his show “by insisting that ‘paths to victory remain’ for Trump,” writes Oliver Darcy in a CNN newsletter, adding that there’s “a sizable audience for this alt-reality.”
Proof of that came Monday night, when Nielsen reported that Newsmax briefly out-rated Fox for the first time.
“Newsmax was just a wannabe until Election Day,” Stelter says; “now it’s a real challenger.”
Fox’s recent ratings drop “may also reflect the cable news fallout from Trump being voted out,” Vanity Fair says, adding:
“As the tides have shifted, apparently so has incentive to tune in, now that Fox is no longer interlinked with Trump’s policy moves. Without that power, the network, like Trump himself, could increasingly fade into irrelevance.”