Fox News Tops ABC, NBC And CBS As The Highest-Rated Network This Summer

There was no shortage of tempting options on broadcast and cable television last Thursday: ABC offered two hours of Bachelor in Paradise. Discovery’s “Shark Week” programming included three back-to-back hours, including Great White Sex Battle and Jaws vs. Mega Croc. And NBC aired a two-hour episode of American Ninja Warrior.

But it was Fox News Channel’s lineup of Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham that cruised to prime time ratings victory Thursday, delivering an average total audience of 2.949 million viewers. ABC trailed FNC with 2.915 million viewers, followed by CBS (2.121 million viewers), and NBC (1.787 million viewers).

Fox News was TV’s top-rated television network again Friday night.

But Fox didn’t just have a couple of good nights. The long-dominant force in cable news has been punching above its weight all summer, seizing the title as the most-watched network in broadcasting.

“It’s very satisfying to see that we’ve worked all these years to build something like this, and now it’s right up there beating the other networks,” Fox News President Jay Wallace told me. “It’s not just politics, it’s not just hard news, it’s not just opinion, it’s everything.”

‘We don’t see Fox News anymore as just a news service.’

What does it mean if the highest-rated television network in America is Fox News Channel? For Fox Corporation executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch, it means viewers are seeing Fox News the way he sees it: as more than just a cable news channel.

Back in March, Murdoch told the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that “it’s important to note that we don’t see Fox News anymore as just a news service. We see it as one of the top five broadcast networks in the United States, even though we don’t have the same distribution that broadcast has.”

Networks like ABC, CBS and NBC are in far more homes than Fox News, but this summer’s ratings show that’s not an obstacle to Fox’s rise to the top. In the same way, FNC’s The Five, the most-watched show in cable news, doesn’t even air during prime time – the hours between 8 and 11 p.m. when, traditionally, television viewership is the highest.

Fox News “has become a destination,” Wallace told me. ”The audience knows to come to us.”

‘They all flock to us.’

When a gunman attempted to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania a year ago, the story broke on social media during an otherwise quiet weekend afternoon. Within minutes, millions were watching the story on the Fox News Channel. “It was a Saturday afternoon, four or five o’clock in the afternoon,” Wallace said, remembering how his network’s coverage of the attempted assassination drew an audience of nearly 7 million viewers.

“People will instinctually tune in. It doesn’t take long for the momentum to go from social media,” Wallace said, “for people to turn on their televisions to Fox News.”

When CNN hosted the first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign – the night when President Biden’s performance doomed his chances at re-election – Fox News drew an audience of 9.28 million viewers – essentially matching that of the host network, which had 9.53 million viewers. More than 51 million viewers watched the decisive debate across 17 separate networks that simulcast the program.

After the debate, Fox News Channel’s analysis swamped CNN with FNC drawing a total audience of 9 million viewers while CNN’s audience fell to just 4.4 million viewers. “Even though we didn’t necessarily have (the debate),” Wallace said, “our pre-and-post game was bigger than what CNN had, and they were the ones that secured it.

“Even when the audience may not necessarily be all in on whoever is president giving the State of the Union, they all flock to us for the analysis…we’ve become so familiar with the audience, and I think people are continuing to find us, which is great.”

‘Ahead of the curve’

Wallace says the Biden-Trump debate also proved that Fox News was “ahead of the curve” on news stories like the president’s cognitive decline that many believe was on display during the CNN debate. “Brit Hume, for a long time, had said that something wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders with President Biden’s cognitive ability,” Wallace said. “And you know, sure enough, at the end of the day, some of those issues came up in the debate.”

Wallace pointed to other stories – like President Biden’s use of an autopen – that were first reported on Fox News before breaking wider across the news media. “We weren’t doing it 24/7, but we’re on the record with it,” Wallace said of those stories. “It just goes to us being on top of the zeitgeist of what’s happening.”

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“We have two great White House correspondents, Jacqui Heinrich and Peter Doocy, and they were there for all the Biden years, and they brought up some of these things, and they were chastised,” Wallace told me. “But at the end of the day, you know, we pointed these things out first.”

‘No one rests on their laurels here, I assure you of that.’

So far this summer, Fox News programs like Special Report with Bret Baier, Hannity, Gutfeld!, Jesse Watters Primetime and The Five have outpaced broadcast hits like NBC’s Law and Order and Law and Order: SVU, CBS’ The Price is Right and The Amazing Race, and ABC’s Shark Tank.

From Memorial Day through July 14th, Fox News Channel delivered an average prime time audience of 3 million viewers, ahead of ABC (2.8 million viewers), NBC (2.4 million viewers) and CBS (2.1 million viewers). Fox even beat TNT, which had a total audience of 1.76 million viewers in prime, driven largely by the NBA Playoffs.

And in late night, FNC’s Gutfeld! has a year-to-date average audience of 3.161 million viewers, beating all of the broadcast late night hosts, including Stephen Colbert, whose The Late Show on CBS had an average audience of 1.864 million viewers. Colbert announced last week that he’d been told CBS would end the 30-year-old franchise next year.

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! (1.514 million viewers), NBC’s The Tonight Show (1.101 million viewers) and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (473,000 viewers) all trailed Fox, according to ratings data compiled by Nielsen.

As Ben Sasse notes in The Wall Street Journal, Colbert’s audience – while the largest among the broadcast networks in late night – dropped 30% over the last five years, and his ratings – like all of the legacy late night hosts – are tiny compared to the 9 million nightly viewers that Johnny Carson delivered at his peak on NBC’s Tonight Show.

“We have the best opinion talent, and Sean and Jesse are doing great,” Wallace told me. “And even in comedy. I mean, Gutfeld is killing it. And then hard news, Bret Baier has been owning it as well…the way we’re able to pivot and produce television and content in ways that really speaks to the audience, I think it’s really paying dividends.”

“I think (the ratings performance) is a feather in the cap to what Rupert and Lachlan have built, and what Suzanne has put together, and what everyone here does in the field, busting their asses, covering tough stories and very sad stories, and wars, and all of it,” Wallace said. “I think it has paid off, and I think the audience sees that. So we’ll just keep working at it and grinding it out. But you know, there are a lot of proud people, but no one rests on their laurels here. I assure you of that.”