FOX News more than held its own in 2024, even as ratings plummeted at MSNBC and CNN in the wake of Donald Trump's 2024 victory.
According to data from Nielsen Media Research, in the wake of Donald Trump's victory audiences fled in droves from FOX News' more liberal competitors in the month following the decisive win. The outlets and anchors most critical of the Republican ticket suffered the most defections.
Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC dropped by 43% among all viewers and 56% among the most profitable demographic of 25-54-year-olds. "Morning Joe," MSNBC's morning show, hemorrhaged viewers too, dropping 34% after the election. Overall, prime-time viewership in the four weeks post-election dropped by 53% at CNN and 45% at MSNBC.
By contrast, FOX News heads into the New Year with the wind at its back. For the ninth consecutive year, FOX was the highest-rated cable network. One month before Trump's inauguration, FOX holds 55% of the cable news audience in prime time. Nielsen's ratings also showed FOX posted double-digit gains in 2024 among nearly all demographics and in all time slots.
At a time when the news media is siloed along partisan lines, FOX executives expressed gratification at the end-of-year numbers. "Throughout coverage of a tumultuous political cycle, wars in the Middle East and major breaking news events, millions of viewers across the political spectrum continued to tune into FOX News Channel for our unrivaled reporting and analysis," FOX News Media CEO Suzanne Scott said in a written statement. "I am extremely proud of our entire team for proving once again why we are the nation's most-watched network as we outpaced the competition in covering the stories that mattered most to everyday Americans."
The new data is the reverse of what happened the first time Donald Trump was elected president. After the 2016 election, revenue increased for CNN and MSNBC during the Trump years - as it did for legacy print and online outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post. With Joe Biden in the White House, ratings and readership tended to decrease in 2021 and 2022, however.
Although part of this dynamic may be attributed to something like "resistance fatigue," large forces at work include overall declining ratings - and declining faith in journalism itself. Pew Research senior researcher Elisa Shearer told RealClearPolitics that the number of Americans who still often get their news from TV in 2024 was just 33% - down from 40% in 2020. She said this decline "is nothing as precipitous as what we see with like print publications or people getting news from radio."
Efforts To Combat Decline in Viewership
Several prominent news organizations have addressed falling readership and viewership by shaking things up. After losing more than $150 million over 2022 and 2023 and 50% of its digital viewership since 2020, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos brought in new leadership. He also generated a rebellion within the ranks by spiking the paper's planned presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris before it ran. As if to show how intractable the legacy news media's problems are, this decision led to mass cancellations in subscriptions.
"Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election," Bezos wrote in an editorial on Oct. 28. "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias."
In the editorial, he cited a Gallup poll which showed that in 2023 and 2024, distrust in mass media, such as TV, was at an all-time high, and the percentage of respondents who had a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in mass media was at an all-time low of 31%. Among Republicans, it was much lower, at just 12%, while it was higher among Democrats at 54%.
As television networks and traditional newspapers lose audiences, social media news consumption continues to grow. According to a Pew survey taken July 15-Aug. 4, the percentage of U.S. adults who prefer social media as their primary way of getting news jumped from 11% to 18%, and those who primarily got their news from podcasts doubled from 3% in 2020 to 6% in 2023.
This data came even before Trump's podcast blitz, which to date has garnered more than 80 million views on YouTube alone, along with tens of millions more on other platforms that host podcasts such as Spotify, Apple Music, and X. One of the benefits of video podcasts is the hundreds of millions of views that clips of the podcasts can receive on other platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram.
Another factor weighing down the broadcast networks are huge salaries paid to anchors and television personalities. The networks' top-heavy salary structures leave less money to hire straight news reporters, furthering the spiral of opinion-mongering that pigeonholes the networks into ideological ghettos. They also draw unwanted scrutiny. Is Rachel Maddow really worth $30 million a year? Is George Stephanopoulos worth $20 million?
Stephanopoulos' salary came under withering scrutiny last week after ABC News settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump - he said Stephanopoulos had libeled him - for $15 million, plus attorneys' fees. Days later, ABC announced that it had re-upped the "Good Morning America" anchorman, albeit at a slightly reduced salary.
Similar contract discussions are happening across the industry, most notably at CNN, where employees are bracing for possible layoffs or salary cuts. Some media critics find such recalibrations long overdue.
When CNN Capitol Hill reporter Manu Raju asked Sen. Dick Durbin about a congressional pay raises Congress had tried to sneak into a continuing budget resolution, Durbin gave as good as he got.
"People look at the performance of Congress and say, 'Why should we give them more money?'" Raju said.
"What about the media?" Durbin replied. "Half of your listeners are not there anymore and you're still getting the same paycheck."
