Conservatives don't watch FOX news anymore Originally Posted by zerodahero
I guess that would depend on your definition of Conservative but to your point, Fox News still beats the other often referred to as Conservative platforms like NewsMax, by a large margin and while this is merely my opinion, those more "far right" have switched because they perceive ( some ) Fox News of abandoning/ moving away from Trump.
I tried watching some NewsMax but went back to Fox News.I think the biggest misconception of those against Fox News, have the idea that Fox News agrees with/ promotes White Supremacy, Proud Boys and Qanon and nothing could be further from the truth especially Tucker Carlson who speaks against such groups all the time. I don't know of a single on air person that has ever expressed "support" for any of these groups.
While they have, on occasion, given some of these people a platform to speak, what we use to refer to as free speech, that is to inform you of what is being said, not necessarily endorsing what is said.
Many of us can tell the difference, obviously some can't.
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2021...pher-ruddy-oan
ForFor a while, it looked like the dominance of Fox News could be a casualty of the 2020 election.
The conservative-leaning network’s ratings dipped after months of complaints by former President Donald Trump and anger stemming from its election-night coverage. This was a change so momentous that even people in Europe took note. A headline in the UK’s Independent read: “‘We are lost’: Fox News suffers worst ratings in 20 years.”
The unexpected decline in ratings was a fresh headache for the network Rupert Murdoch started in 1996, which had finally put behind it the publicity stemming from the 2019 film “Bombshell,” which was a partially fictionalized account of sexual harassment within the company. And there was another, bigger headache to come. Last month, the company was sued for defamation by election technology company Smartmatic, which is seeking more than $2 billion in damages in a lawsuit that Fox has asked the court to dismiss.
Even absent schadenfreude, it seems a particularly good time to be Christopher Ruddy.
The founder of Fox competitor Newsmax, Ruddy has been tilling the ground of cable news since 2014, when he added television to the offerings of the media company he started in 1998. Last fall, Ruddy’s efforts were fertilized by his longtime friend Donald Trump, who, unhappy with Fox’s election coverage, started encouraging his supporters to check out Newsmax and another Fox challenger, the One America News Network, known as OAN.
But it may be technology, not politics, that ultimately decides the winner in the matchup between Newsmax and Fox. As in talk radio, the audience is graying, and Newsmax and OAN could have a technological advantage because they came of age during a time of transition that is affecting all forms of conservative media.
“Fox has an old-school infrastructure. OAN and Newsmax are probably teaching a lot of people who were resisting watching news on their computer to do it, just like grandchildren convinced a lot of older people to finally get an email address or get on Facebook back in the day,” said Robert Thompson, professor of radio, television and film at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
But Fox also has a solid advantage in its longevity and success stemming from a business model that caused other cable news channels to pivot. That leaves its competitors, both on the left and the right, mulling a perennial problem: how do you outfox Fox?
If Newsmax figures it out, the story will have an especially fascinating beginning, since Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corporation, gave Newsmax’s Ruddy his first job as a reporter.
In December, The Washington Post interviewed former Fox watchers who switched to Newsmax because they were upset when Fox called Arizona for Biden on election night, before two other networks. One of the 15 former Fox viewers that the Post’s Jeremy Barr spoke to said they “felt duped.”
“Their stories lend texture to what has been a quantifiable shift in the number of people who watch Newsmax,” Barr wrote.
But Fox, which declined to speak with the Deseret News for this article, continues to churn out news releases showing its continued, across-the-board dominance in cable news.
“Since January 2002, FNC remained the most-watched cable news network across both day-parts with total viewers and in the key 25-54 demographic. Notably, the network continues to post yet another streak as No. 1 in all of television in weekday primetime, topping all broadcast networks in total viewers beginning Memorial Day 2020 to date,” a Feb. 2 news release said.
And in a Feb. 9 earnings call with investors, Fox Corp. Executive Chairman and CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Fox was the most-watched station on election night, “beating all television networks and averaging 25% share of total viewers.”
Murdoch said, however, that Fox was seeing a “post-election audience pullback” that the network had anticipated. “We fully expect that the overall news audience will normalize and our share of ratings will dominate. In fact, this trend is already beginning as we have seen substantial share gains versus our competition since the inauguration,” Lachlan Murdoch said.
It’s unclear if the competition to which Murdoch referred was Newsmax or all cable news networks.
The website Mediaite reported Monday that Newsmax’s ratings, like most cable news networks, declined last month after an election-related surge. Prime-time viewership at Newsmax the last week of February was 223,000, down from a peak of 495,000 in November, the report said.
Fox, in comparison, drew an average of 3.6 million viewers nightly in 2020, according to a recent Forbes report.
