Hosting a show on a mainstream news media outlet comes with the pressure of delivering a program that draws eyeballs to the television screen. FOX News’ Trey Gowdy shared what he believes can be the most challenging part of hosting a show.
Gowdy recently appeared on The Jason Chaffetz Podcast and noted that the temptation to chase the ratings is something that he avoids, knowing what it could mean to his show.
“We all have a desire to be successful, but you have to define success in your own way, and there’s a temptation to chase ratings,” Trey Gowdy said. “The number of people watching, therefore, means that it must be real quality, and I tried to resist that.”
Furthermore, the Fox News host states that when people decide to chase ratings, often there are stories that anchors neglect, even though it’s a topic close to their hearts because it’s not going to drive ratings.
“There are stories that we don’t hear about, but we probably should,” Gowdy added. “And then there are the stories that you hear about pretty much nonstop, all day long. I think now, two or three times, we’ve done stories on missing women of color. That’s something that was important to me because I actually prosecuted those cases. And to me, it’s part of fairness. It’s not going to be a ratings driver.
“So the hardest part, with the Lord as my witness, my bosses at Fox have never once said a word about ratings. They have never once said, ‘You know, you got to get your numbers up,’ or ‘You got to get this demographic up,’ or ‘You got to be more provocative.’ Never once. But there’s still this temptation.”
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
