Fox News Is Losing Viewers

By Ted McLaughlin
It looks like things are not going so well over at the Fox News network. We have commented before on the troubles that Fox News pundit Glenn Beck is having. He has lost many of his advertisers in this country (and has no advertisers for his show in England). But losing advertisers is not his only problem. He has also lost a ton of his viewing audience. At one time he had an audience of 3.4 million. That has now fallen to around 2 million (a 41.2% drop) and gets only 1.7 million on many days.

That would be a big enough problem for Fox News, but it gets worse. It seems that Beck is not the only show losing viewers. Their entire line-up has lost viewers over the past year. O'Reilly (pictured) and Hannity currently have their worst numbers since January of 2009 (with O'Reilly falling from 1 million viewers then to only 693,000 this May). Van Sustern is at her lowest viewership since May of 2009.

In the daytime Fox News viewership has dropped by 6%. Primetime is doing even worse, having dropped by 7%. The folks over at Politicususa think the drop in viewers may be due to the network unequivocally linking themselves to the teabagger movement, and that might well be true. The network has not just reported the actions of the teabaggers -- they have unashamedly supported them and even helped to organize some of their events. Now the teabaggers are starting to lose some support and Fox News is losing viewers.

Meanwhile, the more liberal news network at MSNBC has seen a daytime gain of 3% and a primetime drop of only 1%.