Tucker Carlson’s Fox Exit Helps Boost Newsmax Ratings

Conservative news channel Newsmax saw its prime-time viewership more than double in the second quarter, as it held on to a good chunk of the gains it made following the departure of Tucker Carlson from rival Fox News.

Newsmax drew 247,000 prime-time viewers in the period, through June 25, compared with 111,000 in the first quarter. 

“We definitely saw a dramatic increase after Tucker,” said Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax’s chief executive. “The departure obviously jolted a lot of his strong supporters.”

Carlson’s last show on Fox News was April 21, and Newsmax’s viewership quickly surged, averaging 334,000 during the last week of April. Ratings have declined from those peaks, but the average remains substantially above first-quarter levels.

Newsmax’s average rating in the second quarter was higher than in the period of the 2020 election, when it gained viewers as it attracted pro-Trump viewers upset about the outcome. That ratings jump didn’t last.

Newsmax’s surge has corresponded with a decline in Fox News’s prime-time ratings following Carlson’s exit. The network’s ratings declined 22% in the second quarter, to about 1.7 million prime-time viewers, though it remains the most-watched cable news network. 

Fox recently announced its new prime-time lineup, which features Jesse Watters in Carlson’s former 8 p.m. slot. Watters’s new show made its debut on July 17. Watters averaged 2.3 million viewers in his first week, lower than Carlson’s ratings but higher than the roughly 1.6 million viewers that the time slot drew a week earlier.  

Fox News declined to comment. The network’s parent, Fox Corp. , shares common ownership with Wall Street Journal parent News Corp.

Second-place network MSNBC saw a slight uptick in prime-time viewers in the second quarter, through June 25, to 1.2 million from roughly 1.1 million in the previous quarter. 

CNN’s average prime-time viewership increased 2.4% to 548,000. Chris Licht departed as CNN’s chief executive during the period, after experiments with morning and prime-time programming failed to boost ratings substantially. 

Beyond Carlson’s departure, the second quarter was flush with news events and major developments affecting cable news channels. Former President Trump was arraigned twice over the course of the quarter, and was found liable by a federal jury for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. 

Newsmax was founded by Ruddy in 1998 as a website, which grew to add a cable channel in 2014. The network, which didn’t declare President Biden the winner of the latest presidential contest until December 2020—weeks after Fox News and other mainstream networks did—surged in popularity after the election. 

During the fourth quarter of 2020, when the presidential election took place, it averaged 242,000 prime-time viewers, a sixfold increase from the previous quarter, according to Nielsen data.

As Trump refused to concede after the election, which he falsely claimed was rigged, Carlson wrote to his then-Fox News producer that “an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us,” according to court documents.

From then on, Newsmax’s prime-time viewership gradually shrank, and hit 111,000 in the first quarter of this year, a period during which DirecTV dropped—and subsequently restored—Newsmax from its cable package. 

Newsmax still trails the largest cable channels by a considerable margin. Sustaining and building on its gains will be challenging, especially as the industry faces challenges such as accelerated cable cord-cutting and an aging viewership base. 

Furthermore, while Fox News, CNN and MSNBC get a lot of revenue from cable subscriptions—a slice of a household’s monthly bill—Newsmax has had a harder time getting some providers to pay those channel-carriage fees. Fox commanded $2.18 in monthly per-subscriber fees in 2022 while CNN brought in $1.16 and MSNBC had 37 cents, according to Kagan, an industry research firm. 

Newsmax expects that all big providers will pay carriage fees in the next year, Ruddy said.

Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two voting-machine companies at the center of false election-rigging claims, have sued news channels including Fox News and Newsmax, accusing them of making defamatory on-air comments about their products in the aftermath of the 2020 election. 

In April, Fox Corp., which had about $4 billion in cash on hand as of March, agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against the network. 

“I don’t believe that we did anything wrong in the previous election,” said Ruddy, who added that he was unsure why Fox settled with Dominion. 

Doug Arthur, an analyst at Huber Research, said a potential settlement similar to Fox’s could have a significant financial impact on Newsmax.  

Ruddy said the cases involving Fox News and Newsmax are different, and that Newsmax made clear there was no evidence the voting software was manipulated.

Write to Isabella Simonetti at [email protected]