And the most-watched cable news show ever is …
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
The country is incredibly divided right now, and cable news is a reflection of that.
Is there a more polarizing cable news station than Fox News? Its diehard viewers are fiercely loyal. Its detractors compare the network to state-run TV and call it a mouthpiece for President Donald Trump and the Republican party. Nobody is in the middle with Fox News. No one is ambivalent.
But there’s no question that it’s immensely popular, and the past few months have proven that more than ever.
The best example of that? The second quarter of 2020 produced the most prolific numbers in the history of the network — not only in primetime, but in daytime, too.
And now for the biggest news of all: Tucker Carlson’s show (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”) not only had the highest-rated quarter, it had the best viewership numbers in the history of cable news.
To be clear, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” now holds the distinction of being the most-watched show in cable news history.
During the quarter, Carlson’s show drew 4.331 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. That breaks the record set by Sean Hannity in the first quarter of this year. Carlson and Hannity made cable news history with both shows drawing more than 4 million viewers in the second quarter. Hannity drew 4.311 million viewers, making it the second-most viewed cable news show ever. (Hannity, by the way, won June with 4.3 million viewers.)
As Deadline’s Denise Petski points out, Carlson’s “ratings came amid pullouts by some key advertisers, including Disney, T-Mobile and Papa Johns, over the host’s polarizing point of view on the Black Lives Matter movement.”
It also came during Carlson’s pendulum-swinging takes on the coronavirus.
Back in March, Carlson, unlike many of his Fox News colleagues at the time, criticized Trump and other Fox News personalities for not taking the coronavirus seriously enough. Then something changed.
The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona wrote Tuesday, “Over the past two months, Carlson has devoted much of his coronavirus coverage to discrediting public health experts, specifically top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. On top of telling his audience to stop listening to Fauci and other health officials, the Fox News star has repeatedly boosted a fellow contrarian, former New York Times reporter-turned-spy-novelist Alex Berenson, as an expert on the deadly virus.”
Baragona added, “Less than a month after his much-lauded call to action on the virus, Carlson declared the crisis to be over — a claim that received far less attention from the mainstream press than his rogue stance against the president.”
Despite his flip-flopping, Carlson clearly remains a hit with viewers, as does Fox News.
To be fair, it is important to point out that those who might be opposed to the type of programming put out by Fox News likely split their cable news viewing between CNN and MSNBC. So it might be more accurate to add up CNN and MSNBC viewers when making comparisons to Fox News.
In that case, the numbers are close to even, further proving just how split this country is.
We’ve heard this before, haven’t we?
(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Axios’ Sara Fischer broke this news Tuesday: Facebook has updated the way news stories are ranked in its News Feed to place a priority on original reporting. In addition, it will demote stories when it isn’t clear who wrote them.
Fischer writes, “The tech giant has long been criticized for not doing enough to elevate quality news over hyper-partisan noise. Now, it's trying to get ahead of that narrative as the 2020 election inches closer.”
So will Facebook users notice a big change? Probably not. As Fischer notes, Facebook will still feature stories from news outlets that users or their friends follow. “But,” Fischer wrote, “the tech giant will boost the more original story within that subset.”
This is clearly Facebook’s attempt to say they are trying to limit the spread of misinformation and what truly are “fake news” stories. But it feels like a rather small step.
Capitalizing the B
In recent weeks, many news outlets have updated their style guides to start capitalizing the B when talking about Black people and culture. The big move was when the Associated Press made the change on June 19. The AP often sets the standard for news outlets across the globe.
This was a huge moment.
Poynter’s Kristen Hare has an absolute must-read about this long-overdue change as she talks to many of the people who made it all happen. Just check out this heartbreaking passage from Hare’s story as she wrote about Temple University’s Lori Tharps.
From her office at Temple University, Lori Tharps overheard a conversation in 2014 that felt familiar.
Another professor was berating a student for capitalizing Black.
Tharps could hear the resignation in that student’s voice as she tried to defend herself and was, instead, made to feel silly.
“Just hearing it out loud made me so mad.”
That lowercase b made Tharps, a journalist and associate professor at Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication, feel the same way that she felt as the only Black girl in her Milwaukee neighborhood — small, inferior, not worthy of acknowledgment.
And as a professional writer, every time she had to use lowercase black alongside Asian Americans or Latinos, it made her feel like a second-class citizen.
I asked Hare about her story.
“The news about the AP Stylebook’s move to capitalize Black when referring to people and culture came out near the end of a long Friday,” she told me. “We covered it with a brief, and we heard from some of the people involved behind the scenes that we’d missed a bigger story. They were so right. I reached out to several people to learn more. The result is a long look at many of the men and women who’ve been working for years to convince journalists, newsrooms and the AP to acknowledge Blackness as a culture and identity worthy of a proper noun.”
Hare’s piece is well worth your time — not just for journalists but for everyone.
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