Many had questioned what the television ratings would look like after Fox News fired Tucker Carlson last week. The numbers were not promising, and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly was quick to point out the stunning losses.
After Carlson’s departure last week, the 8:00 PM ET timeslot that had previously averaged over 3 million viewers for Tucker Carlson Tonight saw 1.4 million viewers by the end of the week for what the network is calling Fox News Tonight. The program was neck-and-neck with MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes after routinely dominating the window. The Hayes-led program actually defeated Fox News in the 25-54 demographic on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
“Just some of the terms that come to mind: massacre, bloodbath, murder, devastation,” said Kelly during her SiriusXM program. “The audience is gone. They left. There’s virtually no one there at 8:00 PM anymore. Just as bad as I’m sure Fox News was worried it would get, it’s far worse than that…they’ve lost almost two-thirds of their audience in the 8:00 PM timeslot. It’s total devastation.”
After going through the viewership totals for the days following Carlson’s exit, Kelly claimed the numbers signal a death knell for the conservative news outlet.
“Fox News is in a downward spiral that they’re going to have to claw to get themselves out of,” Kelly continued. “Just for context, these numbers, overall, are so dreadful that we went back and looked back at when I was #1, hosting at 9:00 PM ET on Fox News, you know what my demo was in October, right before I left? 641,000 in the key demo. They are down to 124,000 right now at the 8:00 PM, and this is an existential crisis for the channel because this is how they make money…They live off their primetime, and the food has dried up.”
Kelly hosted a primetime show — The Kelly File — for Fox News from October 2013 until January 2017.
