Fox News Falling Apart?: Ratings Said To Be in Freefall While Late-night Comedians Continue to Poke Network
Fox News Falling Apart?: Ratings Said To Be in Freefall While Late-night Comedians Continue to Poke Network
Network reportedly keeps "oppo-file" on Tucker Carlson
Things apparently have not been well at Fox News since the right-wing network ousted its star primetime host earlier this week.
Ratings reportedly have fallen, while it's become a punching bag — both for some of the most strident figures on the political right as well as the late-night funnymen.
Fox News announced Monday the stunning news that it had cut ties with hard-right propagandist Tucker Carlson. The decision to fire Carlson came just days after the network agreed to pay out an unprecedented $787.5 million settlement to begin resolving defamation claims related to the network and its on-air talent repeating known lies that Donald Trump somehow won the 2020 presidential election.
Fox now also faces an additional suit brought by a former producer of Carlson's program, in which she says that she was coerced to give misleading testimony in the case which Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox, the one which ended in that massive, nearly $800-million payout.
Fox fired Carlson so suddenly that it hasn't lined up a permanent replacement for its 8 pm ET timeslot.
And without the bombastic, white supremacist Carlson in place, ratings are suffering, according to CNN reporter Oliver Darcy.
“I think it's also noteworthy, Anderson, that without Carlson in the 8 pm hour over at Fox News, the ratings over there are really collapsing,” Darcy revealed in an on-camera appearance with host Anderson Cooper. “Last night, in the key advertiser-supported or coveted 25-54 [demographic], they saw the worst ratings since pre-9/11. That's a really staggering drop over at Fox News.
“The hour before? It actually rated higher than the 8:00 pm hour, which is something of an anomaly over at Fox, something that certainly never happened when Tucker Carlson was in that hour,” Darcy added. “And so I think as we're watching this, it's really interesting to see the ramifications it is having at Fox and also at the smaller right-wing channel Newsmax, which is seeing its ratings surge.”
Meanwhile, a prominent figure on the political right absolutely unloaded on Fox News and its decision to let Carlson go, calling it a surrender to what she calls “the woke mob.”
“Our First Amendment is free speech, but it’s also freedom of press. And when a gigantic media company like Fox News fires their number one, Tucker Carlson — not for him doing anything wrong, not because his writings were bad — but they literally fired him because they caved to the woke mob,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right Republican congresswoman from Georgia who supports various conspiracy theories and supports the violent insurrectionists that attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. “What we’re seeing is we’re seeing the end of the First Amendment. That’s how I see it. I can’t see it any other way. We've seen censorship out of control.”
Meanwhile, the Carlson firing remains the gift that keeps on giving for the late-night comedians, particularly new reporting that Fox News executives have kept dirt on Carlson in order to keep him from ever retaliating against the network.
One source even calls it an “oppo file” on the former Fox host.
That's enough to keep the jokes coming for network TV funnymen.
“Apparently something they do over there, they collect compromising information about their employees in the case they need to use it. But what could they have on Tucker Carlson that would embarrass him?” ABC late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel quipped. “He once tried to buy a fuel-efficient car? He has a collection of pennies that were not by Hitler? Do they have pictures of him on a horse French kissing Vladimir Putin? That he dresses up as a drag queen and read stories to kids?
“To quote Tucker, ‘I’m not saying he did those things, I’m just asking questions,’” Kimmel cracked. “Why wouldn’t we ask questions about things like that? One super weapon Fox News has to embarrass him is every episode of his show.”
And Kimmel wasn't the only one who poked fun at Carlson and the alleged collection of dirt on him.
“Also, if you’re an employer collecting ‘dirt’ on an employee, but you’re not doing anything about it unless you need it for revenge, that speaks badly of them and of you that’s not how HR is supposed to work,” joked Seth Meyers, of NBC. “When we did our HR training here at Late Night, I don’t remember anyone saying, ‘And just remember, we’ll be keeping a blackmail file on all of you.’
“This is the state of the MAGA movement it’s an abject failure and now they’re all devouring each other,” Meyers added.
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