Fox News has stopped covering Trump’s rallies live because they were drawing lower rating than their regular primetime programming.
Politico reported, “During three Trump rallies last week, Fox News showed clips and highlights from his speeches but stuck largely with its normal weekday prime-time programming. On Saturday, when “Fox Report Weekend” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” would ordinarily air, the network showed Trump’s speech from Topeka, Kan., in full. But on Tuesday, a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was particularly hard to find — it was not aired live on any major network, and even C-SPAN cut away for other news. And on Wednesday night, as Trump took the stage in Erie, Pa., at 7 p.m., Fox News stuck with its coverage of Hurricane Michael.”
Trump is a ratings loser for Fox News
Fox News viewers still love Trump, but they don’t tune in because everybody has seen Trump’s act before. He offers nothing new. It is the same old schtick, with the same tired lock her up and build the wall chants that viewers have heard for the last three years. Trump needs to get some new material. CNN and MSNBC dumped Trump’s rallies long ago, as the networks both deemed them not newsworthy, but it is still a blow that Trump’s cable news home base doesn’t want to take the hit of showing his rambling rallies to a Trump fatigued nation.
It would not be surprising if the White House tried to respond by moving more of Trump’s events to the weekends, but that might be impossible due to the lazy president’s habit of not doing any work after 3 PM on Friday until nearly noon on Monday.
Trump’s rallies do worse for Fox News than their normal primetime lineup, and with the network being a dogfight with MSNBC for number one in cable news they can’t afford to throw away hundreds of thousands of viewers to make the president feel better about himself.
Viewership for Trump rallies on Fox has gone from a high of 4 million in 2017 to a low of 2.5 million this year.
Trump lived off of free media in 2016, but that well has run dry, so the president’s rallies have been banished to the Internet as weary nation breathes a sigh of relief.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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