Cable news ratings have fallen off a cliff during the presidency of Joe Biden. Media moguls — including former President Donald Trump — have some ideas about why.
On Wednesday, Trump went on Truth Social and dropped a bombshell: Fox News “would die without me.”
Trump was responding to a comment from conservative commentator Dave Rubin of The Blaze TV.
Last month, Rubin told Fox News Digital that CNN’s liberal pundits are secretly hoping for a Trump campaign to boost their ratings.
“Whether DeSantis runs or not, they want Trump to be this sort of destructive force throughout the Republican Party because they love two things: they love ratings and the destruction of the Republicans,” Rubin said, referring to the possibility of a messy Republican primary in 2024.
“Even the CNN propagandists, even Don Lemon and Jake Tapper and [Brian] Stelter and [Jim] Acosta who pretend to hate Trump, pretend he was Hitler, treated him completely unfairly, hide stories that go against Biden — they want him to run because he brings them ratings.”
Trump shared Rubin’s remarks on Truth Social. The former president added, “And Fox, which would die without me!”
The former president set off a shock wave with this post.
Certainly, MSNBC has cashed in on the Trump presidency. The network hit its ratings peak during his administration, and it became the most watched cable news network during the timeslot for the congressional hearings on the Capitol riot.
However, CNN is free-falling so rapidly that not even Trump could save it.
In the meantime, Fox News has gone more than three months without interviewing Trump, and the network still pulled more total viewers in July than both CNN and MSNBC combined, according to Nielsen ratings reviewed by Mediaite Thursday.
Last month, one report from The New York Times gave rise to a controversial theory about Fox News secretly “shadow banning” the former president from its airwaves.
One analyst for The Washington Post disputed the “shadow ban” theory. He said that Fox News is simply covering the current president instead of the former president.
Fox News has made money off Trump in the past.
The media mogul Rupert Murdoch — who owns both Fox News and New York Post — made a fortune while printing tabloid headlines about Trump in the 1980s.
The Horn editorial team