Before Fox News Channel made the astounding decision to fire Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity could coast off of Tucker’s popularity and success. Tucker was always on at 8 pm EST shart, and Hannity followed right after him and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” wth “Hannity” at 9 pm EST. People turned on the TV at a 8 to watch Tucker and then some stuck around to watch Hannity at 9, boosting his ratings.
Not anymore, Now that Fox News fired Tucker, Hannity not only can’t coast off of Tucker, but has to try and reel in an audience furious with the network for getting rid of the one populist and right-leaning host it had on. Tucker was associated with Trump, and Fox News got rid of him, infuriating many fans and leading them to boycott the network and its hosts, including Hannity.
And Hannity has not been able to overcome those new challenges: his ratings have fallen like a rock since Tucker left. In fact, according to Mediaite data, Hannity is now managing to bring in only about 1.7 million viewers per episode. That’s a little over half of what he was getting when he followed Tucker, at which time his show got about 3 million viewers on average.
According to that data, Hannity also had an abysmally bad performance with the key 25-54-year-old demographic that advertisers want to see, bringing in only 176,000 of that highly important crowd.
Fox News generally has been struggling. “The Five” was its most popular show, but it still brought in just 2.6 million viewers on average, among whom just 267,000 were from the 25-54 demographic.
And so, during the month of May, which was its first full month without Tucker, Fox News brought in just 1.42 million primetime viewers on average, nearly a 40 percent year-over-year drop. That’s also about 25 percent lower than the first quarter of this year, during which Fox News Channel brought in about 2.09 million primetime viewers on average.
Fox News Channel is also no longer beating CNN and MSNBC together. Whereas it used to outpace both stations, it now brings in just the 1.42 million average viewers compared to the combined 1,654,000 CNN and MSNBC bring in, with CNN getting 494,000 and MSNBC getting 1.16 million. MSNBC, in contract to Fox News and CNN, actually saw a bunch in viewership year-over-year, with its viewers going up by 14 percent compared to this time last year.
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In any case, the ratings news is bad news for Hannity, as he’s supposedly going to be taking over Tucker’s 8 pm time slot. That’s unlikely to win back Tucker’s fans, both because of Tucker’s wildly popular new show on Twitter, which gets far more views than all of FNC combined, and because most on the populist right view Hannity as controlled opposition and a shill for the elites in a way that Tucker, though very wealthy and from that crowd of people, is not. It remains to be seen, however, if Hannity is able to leap those hurdles and repair both his reputation among MAGA and FNC’s ratings, though both seem very doubtful.