A Day After Maddow Handed Fox News a Painful Defeat, Tucker Added Insult to Injury
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow handed Fox News a ratings defeat in prime time on Monday that Tucker Carlson made worse a day later when he debuted his new show on Twitter.
According to Mediaite, Maddow won the 9 p.m. Eastern time slot against “Hannity” and “CNN Primetime,” attracting more than 2.4 million total viewers to her show.
Fox came in second with just over 2 million viewers, while the sinking ship called CNN predictably came in a distant third with 622,000.
Such wins are becoming more common for MSNBC, as Fox has lost about 1 million viewers since it made the head-scratching decision to oust Carlson in April.
Cable news’ formerly top-rated host vowed to bring his talents to Twitter, which kept many of his diehard fans eagerly waiting for what was to come.
The wait was over on Tuesday afternoon when Carlson unveiled the first chapter of his next act. “Tucker on Twitter” debuted a 10-minute episode that challenged the corporate media’s reporting on a number of topics.
Ep. 1 pic.twitter.com/O7CdPjF830
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2023
It appears as though Carlson will embrace his freedom from the censors at his former network.
But what was truly stunning about the debut was that it took less than 24 hours for the video to rack up more than 83 million views and counting.
When compared with an average cable news audience, that number is astounding.
It is impossible to know how many of those views were from different users, but the message is clear: While cable news networks fight over a shrinking audience, Carlson is now untethered and has a larger platform than ever before.
Had Fox kept its star host, he probably would have delivered a routine ratings win over MSNBC and CNN on Monday.
Instead, his show’s successor, “Fox News Tonight,” was watched by only 1.59 million people on Monday — an audience that was roughly half of what Carlson pulled in on any given night.
Less than 24 hours later, he premiered an episode on Twitter that was watched tens of millions of times in just a matter of hours.
All of this makes Fox’s decision to boot its most popular host all the more confounding. The network sacrificed about a million potential viewers for reasons that are not publicly known.
Now, Carlson’s self-produced show will be racking up numbers on a social media platform that traditional media executives can only dream of.
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