Schumer's Fears Come True: Tucker's Jan. 6 Videos Draw Ratings That Blow Competitors Out of the Water
This is what Chuck Schumer was afraid of.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s reports this week showing previously unseen footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion turned out to shatter more than just the establishment media’s narrative of that day’s events.
They shattered the world of television ratings, too.
On Monday, the day of Carlson’s first report on more than 40,000 hours of Capitol surveillance video released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” drew just shy of 3.7 million viewers, according to Mediaite. (The outlet covers the political media with a decidedly leftist spin, but these numbers were unspinnable.)
That put the lightning-rod Fox host at No. 1 in the ratings for the day — well ahead of his 8 p.m. “competition” on liberal networks MSNBC and CNN. At MSNBC, “All in with Chris Hayes” landed about 1.2 million viewers, according to Mediaite, while CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” drew a paltry 582,000.
Carlson’s report was a frontal assault on the narrative pushed by President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party that the incursion was an actual “insurrection” against the government of the United States. And it poked holes in key elements of the progressive propaganda surrounding the incident.
In response, Schumer used his position as Senate majority leader to issue a brazen appeal to Fox from the Senate floor to keep Carlson off the air on Tuesday night, when a follow-up report was coming.
Fox, of course, did not comply. And the ratings Carlson posted Tuesday were even higher — a rare occasion of a sequel outdoing the original.
On Tuesday, according to Mediaite, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” surpassed 4.1 million viewers — almost three times more than “All in with Chris Hayes” and over seven times more than the 577,000 viewers “Anderson Cooper 360” garnered.
Cable News Ratings Overload Tue Mar 7
Fox News had more total and 25 to 54 year old demo viewers than MSNBC, CNN, Newsmax & NewsNation combined.
Primetime Average Demo | Total Viewers
@FoxNews 404,000 | 3,057,000
@MSNBC 163,667 | 1,494,333
@CNN 94,333 |… https://t.co/z5GhW3ko6o pic.twitter.com/26EcR9ATen— RoadMN (@RoadMN) March 8, 2023
Clearly, Carlson has struck a nerve in a country where the federal government and its media allies are bent on force-feeding a version of the events of Jan. 6 with the maximum smear potential on former President Donald Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who support him.
It looks like Schumer’s call to censor Carlson’s program to keep Americans from learning more about Jan. 6 than Democrats want them to know had exactly the opposite effect.
And what did Americans learn on Tuesday night? Carlson’s interview with Tarik Johnson, a veteran of more than 20 years on the Capitol Police force who was in charge of security during the certification of the 2020 election, demonstrated in shocking detail how unprepared the force was for mass protests that day — and how badly the Capitol Police command responded.
It wasn’t the narrative Schumer, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Biden White House have promulgated, of course, but the most damaging revelation might have been that Johnson was never called to testify before the committee Pelosi handpicked to “investigate” the day’s events.
It was basically proof that the grandiosely named House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was nothing more than political theater of the absurd, aimed at framing the day in a way to damage Trump and his supporters with little interest in the truth of the matter.
The committee was, in short, a vehicle for a lie.
But numbers don’t lie.
And the ratings for Carlson’s Monday and Tuesday programs show that there are millions of Americans out there who want the truth — the truth they’re not getting from a hideously biased establishment media.
And the truth is really what Chuck Schumer is afraid of.
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