Poor Martha MacCallum just isn’t Trumpy enough for younger MAGA viewers as Newsmax TV’s Greg Kelly Reports beat The Story with Martha MacCallum in the key 25-50 year-old demographic.
From CNN’s Brian Stelter:
The margin was narrow — Kelly averaged 229,000 viewers in the demo and MacCallum averaged 203,000 — but it is still a milestone in the cable news industry.
Before the election, Newsmax was not regarded as a formidable competitor to Fox; it was mostly dismissed as one of a handful of wannabe challengers.
…
Fox News is still four times higher-rated than Newsmax at any given time of day, according to Nielsen. Among viewers of all ages, Fox averaged 1.36 million viewers around the clock on Monday, while Newsmax averaged 316,000 viewers.
But Fox is down from its pre-election highs while Newsmax is way up.
Stelter describes Kelly’s show, Newsmax’s highest-rated, as akin to Tucker Carlson’s, Sean Hannity’s and Laura Ingraham’s. Which is not a huge surprise given that Kelly is a former Fox & Friends cohost.
The ratings trajectory is worrying Fox. Last month, Stelter wrote an article called “Fox News staffers thought Newsmax was a joke. But they're not laughing anymore.”
Producers on some Fox programs have been told to monitor Newsmax's guest bookings and throw some sand in Newsmax's gears by encouraging guests who appear on both channels to stop saying yes to the upstart.
According to Fox sources, producers were told to avoid some regular guests if they kept showing up on Newsmax after being encouraged to stop. Management's goal: to remind guests who's boss in the right-wing media world.
But Stelter also notes that Newsmax is not the only right-wing competitor. There’s One America News and two streaming services that feature names familiar to Fox viewers.
I’m perfectly happy to see the right-wing media pie cut up. One reason Fox News has been such a juggernaut is because it had the territory to itself while CNN and MSNBC split the rest of the (older) viewers. Younger people watch less cable altogether. But if more right-wing competition means that networks try to out-radicalize each other, that’s a real cause for alarm.
(Kelly/Noem image via screen grab)
Not to worry, so long as there are like-minded people on blogs like Newshounds (thanks so much, Ellen), I will persist in bucking the stoooopiditeee.
I fear that short of Wrinkled Rupert turning up his toes, the only outcome of this besiegement of Fox ‘News’ by the even wackier fringe outlets will be that the Hannitys, Carlsons and Ingrahams will drag the channel right out into Genghis Khan territory to compete.
There may be some method in their madness: those irritating messages seem to depress my inclination to post a comment.