Fox News struggled the last several months.
40 percent of the audience fled thinking the network abandoned Donald Trump.
And Fox News announced one major programming change now that Joe Biden is in office.
Before the election, reports surfaced that Fox News board member Paul Ryan pushed Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch to ditch Donald Trump and move the network to the center.
Chris Wallace’s biased debate moderating performance as well as Fox News Channel’s incorrect election night call that the Democrats would win between 5 and 15 seats in the House of Representatives seemed to confirm the worst fears of many viewers.
As a result, a significant chunk of Fox News Channel’s audience sampled Newsmax and One America News Network as alternatives.
Lachlan Murdoch addressed Fox News Channel’s ratings swoon—in January, Fox lost its title as top-rated cable news network which it held for nearly 20 years—at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media and Telecom Conference.
NBC’s Dylan Byers reported that Murdoch claimed Fox News expected a dip in the ratings as the vast majority of its audience was disappointed with the election result.
“’We don’t get emotional’ about Fox News ratings…Expected a dip in audience post-election cycle…’That happened exactly as we projected,’” Byers wrote on social media.
Byers reported that Murdoch explained that CNN and MSNBC saw their ratings skyrocket as a result of positioning themselves as the opposition to the Trump administration and Murdoch expected Fox News to benefit from a similar dynamic now that Joe Biden holds power and is pushing the most radical agenda Americans have ever seen.
“The main beneficiary of the Trump administration from a ratings points of view was MSNBC… and that’s because they’re the loyal opposition… that’s what our job is now with the Biden administration, and you’ll see our ratings really improve from here,” Byers reported Murdoch saying.
Murdoch also reportedly told the attendees that MSNBC and CNN’s ratings began to plummet now that Donald Trump is out of office and their liberal viewers aren’t living in a 24-hour-a-day and seven-day-a-week state of perpetual outrage.
But Murdoch also made it clear that the network would not shift to the left, claiming that nearly 75,000,000 people voted for Donald Trump and they expected there to be news outlets that represented their views.
“Seventy-five million people voted for a Republican president, sometimes in spite of his personality at times … that’s what we represent. We’re going to stick to the center-right. That’s where our audience is,” Variety’s Brian Steinberg reported.
Of course Fox News did panic about their ratings.
That’s why the network fired Never Trump politics editor Chris Stirewalt.
Panic is why Fox News gave pro-Trump host Greg Gutfeld a weekly 11 p.m. show and bumped Shannon Breams’ newscast to midnight.
And panic about ratings is why Fox moved Martha McCallum’s news broadcast from 7 p.m. to daytime and created a new primetime opinion program where a rotating cast of pro-Trump hosts auditioned for the permanent gig.
Fox did try moving to the center.
But the audience rejected the programming shift because if they want a liberal slant on the day’s events, they can always watch CNN or MSNBC.
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