Fox News is Dead
Fox News!
The very name sends shivers up the spine of any liberal or progressive.
Fox News. The network that created Donald Trump. Fox News, the never ending source of bad information. Fox News, the voice of the right wing in America. Rupert Murdoch, the man who destroyed the United States with his Fox News.
Fox News. Pretty scary. Like the threat of Terrorists! or Communists! Pretty scary until you look under the hood. When you do that, like the Wizard of Oz, there actually isn’t a whole lot there.
Despite its endless stream of right wing news or propaganda (take your choice), the fact is that there just aren’t a lot of people watching Fox News.
How many people are actually watching? According to Fox News themselves, they are “the most watched cable news channel in America!” That much is true. According to them, they also “retained the largest share of cable news audience with 52% of viewers…”
Impressive, until you read what that really means.
Fox News 1,571,000 viewers overall and 215,000 in the all important 25–54 demo. The media age of Fox viewers is 68 years old.
Got the numbers? 1.5 million viewers out of a population of 340 million people, or 1/2 of one percent (0.5%) of the population of the country is actually watching Fox News — in short, pretty much no one — except, I supposed, the ‘media elite’. 99.5% of the country doesn’t watch Fox News. I bet if you took away the endless broadcasts in airports, the numbers would be even lower.
I am aware of this because I recently wrote to Alan McCormick, the Chairman of GB News here in the UK. GB News was launched as a kind of Fox News for Britain, and at considerable cost. After spending so much money, GB News has 70,430 viewers across a 24 hour period. That is equivalent to the population of Bognor Regis, a town which you have probably never heard of or want to visit. Mr. McCormick would be better off handing out £10 notes and a DVD of advertising on the corner in Bognor Regis. (PS. no answer yet from Mr. McCormick, but one never knows. I suggested Netflix as a model to improve ratings).
By way of comparison, just to put the ‘danger’ of Fox News in perspective The New York Times has 8.5 million readers a day. That is, five times the number of people watching Fox News are reading The New York Times. Do we think of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. as a thread to democracy the way we see Rupert Murdoch?
So, if 99.5% of the country is not watching Fox News, and it seems that they aren’t where are they getting their news from?
In the US, 170 million people use TikTok on a daily basis. 193 million people in the US are on Facebook on a daily basis. 166 million are on Istagram, where (and here is that all important demographic number) 75% of people aged 18–24 use Instagram on a daily basis.
You want to know where people are getting their news and information? It isn’t Fox News.
The most popular program on Fox News is The Five. It is the highest rated show, with some 3 million viewers, or just under 1% of the US population. 99% of the country is not watching The Five.
Who are the hosts of The Five? Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, Jeannie Pirro and Dana Perrino. Collectively, they get paid $16 million a year to attract an audience of just under 1% of the country.
And who are the hosts of the content at TikTok or Instagram or Facebook?
That would be anyone and everyone.
And how much do they get paid for attracting nearly half the country to watch?
The answer would be… nothing.
This what we call the power of the Citizen Journalist.
It’s coming.
