What’s in the headline here is a simple stat, a cumulative 28 percent decrease in the audience for the top American propaganda television network’s primetime lineup over the period of September 28 through October 25, 2026 vs the previous four weeks. Bloomberg News is the one to speculate on why in their headline, “Fox News Viewer Dip Pre-Election Suggests Republican Unease,” pointing to a natural human tendency to tune out and focus attention elsewhere when it feels like one’s team is having a disastrous month. They then correlate this with MS Now and CNN’s viewership up 16 and 15 percent, respectively, over the same period to bolster the “suggestion” of why Fox is cratering.
Of course it’s pretty goddamned obvious that the correlation of the shitty political situation for the Trump Regime is the causation, just like it’s no mystery why the LA Chargers’ ticket prices have plummeted since the start of this season. Still, kind of ballsy for an MSM outlet to just come out and say this, even if Bloomberg isn’t anywhere near the top of the list of the most recidivist offenders when it comes to insulting people’s intelligence with insufferable “objectivity” horseshit. Especially when the expert quotes – like former CNN/CBS exec Joe Klein saying Fox will “live or die based on the president’s approval and in general, the popularity of MAGA” – could’ve done the lifting just fine.
Yet for what Bloomberg admirably maintained in treating their audience like adults they sort of lacked in bolstering their own thesis with another pretty relevant point of comparison: Fox’s October 2018 ratings. They were good. Very good, up 5 percent from the previous month – which was pretty high on its own because of now-US Supreme Court Justice Beer-Me-Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, and 25 percent higher than October 2017. In absolutes, Fox News’s primetime lineup block averaged 2.85 million viewers during October 2018, now down to about 2 million a night in October 2026, a 30 percent drop across an eight year stretch – during which the MAGA electorate itself grew by 22 percent from 62 million and change Trump voters in 2016 to 77 million-plus in 2024.
Now as much as Fox News is like a national hospice ward catering to viewers in need of Medicare Part B plans, catheters, reverse mortgages, and all sorts of similar bullshit aimed at picking the last scraps of carrion from the near-corpses of so many human lives, there’s no universe in which 30 percent of their fanbase irreplaceably died out of the nightly audience over the last eight years.
Okay, sure. A lot of them definitely did, lol, but not 30 percent.
Like this Floridian is probably still alive. From a purely actuarial standpoint, a man apparently his mid-70s – who was by all visible evidence well-fed, well-groomed, and active on “the dating scene” in this November 4th, 2022 clip – is more likely than not to still have a pulse, despite the downside risks of contracting a potentially fatal venereal disease due to non-condom usage.
Fun as it would be to go around in circles with frivolous speculation about the micro and macro outcomes of Fox News viewers since the Year of The Caravan – when the sheer intensity on both sides led to tons of important wins, not to mention a net gain of two Senate seats, for the GOP, even if they got their asses kicked in the House – let’s just stick to the confluence of data and vibes.
And the reality that, if anything, it’s actually pretty fucking amazing that Fox News has any viewers at all this month when their big interview with the Speaker of the House is just him saying repeatedly that God will take care of it, victory belongs to the righteous, and so on. Being so dishonest that most of your audience doesn’t realize how depressing it is to keep watching this shit is itself its own kind of achievement. Just because Fox is bad doesn’t mean they’re bad at it.