Move over, Tucker Carlson – there’s a new Number One in town, and this one isn’t just about the ratings.
It’s about influence.
The Mediaite website is out with its annual list of the most influential people in the industry, and Carlson was knocked out of the top spot by his own boss: Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.
Mediaite explained its reasoning:
Fox News will end 2022 as the most-watched network in all of cable news in both total day and prime time viewers for the seventh consecutive year. In a year where viewership is down across the board, Fox News remains a ratings juggernaut, its audience often bigger than CNN and MSNBC combined. Each month, the list of most watched cable news programs starts with a dozen or more Fox shows.
Carlson – whose show was pushed out of cable’s top spot by “The Five,” also on Fox News – fell all the way to the number four spot. New CNN chief Chris Licht and his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, shared the number three position, while Twitter owner Elon Musk ranked second.
Scott was named Fox News CEO in 2018, and helped the network navigate three of its biggest challenges all at once: the aftermath of a headline-making sexual harassment scandal, the coronavirus pandemic and the network’s first real competition in years.
That last one came not from CNN and MSNBC, but from other conservative media outlets.
As Mediaite notes, a number of right-leaning networks sprang up during the Trump presidency and some – including Newsmax – made big gains during and after the 2020 election. Instead of ceding any ground to the upstarts, Scott went after them head-on by expanding her network’s wildly popular opinion programming.
That paid off big in the ratings.
Growth among the smaller conservative networks seems to have stalled, and Fox News remains well ahead of both CNN and MSNBC, often being both networks combined.
CNN in particular suffered in 2022, losing a third of its audience compared to 2021 and seeing the instant failure of its CNN+ online service. Fox News, by contrast, has the far more successful Fox Nation online service – an initiative launched early in Scott’s tenure as CEO.
She’s not just beating the other networks on cable and online. Under Scott’s watch, Fox News is competing with the traditional broadcast giants in ways no one ever expected.
The biggest example: late-night television.
In recent years, the late-night hosts on broadcast TV have embraced left-wing politics and turned their shows into nightly attacks on Republicans.
Conservative viewers have responded by turning them off, with ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel admitting he lost about half his audience since he started attacking Donald Trump.
Now, Fox News has given those viewers somewhere else to go with “Gutfeld,” an irreverent mix of comedy, politics and talk hosted by snarky libertarian Greg Gutfeld.
This gamble – also under Scott’s watch – has quickly become a success, with “Gutfeld” regularly defeating Kimmel as well as NBC’s “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. For the year. “Gutfeld” finished behind only Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on CBS in the late-night ratings.
Scott crowed of her network’s “unmatched skill in delivering the most innovative news and opinion programming” in a statement to Forbes.
“I am beyond proud of our entire team’s incredible achievements this year,” she said.
The Mediaite honor isn’t the only distinction Scott’s picked up in recent weeks.
She’s also made the new Forbes list of the most powerful women on the planet. She ranks at 65th on the list, behind fellow media power players such as Oprah Winfrey (24) and Shari Redstone (32), but well above household names Taylor Swift (79), Beyonce (80) and Dolly Parton (96).
Vice President Kamala Harris is the highest-ranking American woman on the list, coming in at third overall.