The much-hyped debut of former Fox News pundit Katie Pavlich’s primetime show on upstart cable network NewsNation, which has featured her promoting the program in several mainstream interviews and scoring a one-on-one sitdown with Donald Trump, has fizzled out the gate.
According to Nielsen Media Research, the Monday night premiere of Katie Pavlich Tonight – which airs at 10 p.m. ET – drew just 58,000 total viewers and 12,000 in the coveted advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54.
Compared to the 2025 weekday average for the true-crime-oriented program hosted by Ashleigh Banfield, whom Pavlich replaced this month, Katie Pavlich Tonight was down 38 percent in total viewership.
While Pavlich’s first night on NewsNation did have the misfortune of going up against the College Football Championship game, which also impacted the rest of cable news Monday evening, Tuesday night’s interview with Trump also pulled in subpar numbers compared to NewsNation’s standard programming over the past year.
Nielsen’s preliminary data shows that the sitdown, which saw the president riffing about paper straws and sinks when asked about his second year priorities, only pulled in 75,000 viewers overall on Tuesday night while averaging just 10,000 in the key advertising demo. The interview was supposed to mark Trump’s one-year anniversary of his second inauguration.
While final numbers will be out later on Thursday afternoon and could show a slight bump from the early data, the friendly Trump interview will still almost certainly be behind what that hour has previously drawn during Banfield’s tenure last year.
According to Nielsen, the Banfield-led program averaged 94,000 viewers overall and 12,000 in the 25-54 demographic throughout 2025. In the fourth quarter of last year, those numbers fell to 80,000 total viewers and a demo audience of 11,000.
Meanwhile, compared to the same day last year, Pavlich was down 44 percent in total viewership and 55 percent in the demographic, as Banfield drew a total viewership of 134,000 and 22,000 in the 25-54 metric. It should be noted, however, that Banfield’s show was aired one day after Trump’s inauguration.
As for the rest of the cable news landscape, Tuesday night saw Fox News’ Gutfeld! lead the 10 p.m. time slot with a robust 2.6 million total viewers, while MS NOW’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell followed far behind with 1.38 million and CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Phillips placed a distant third with a total audience of 656,000.
Even the prospect of a primetime Trump interview couldn’t help NewsNation – which touts itself as a “centrist” cable news alternative but has veered further to the right with its recent on-air hires – defeat MAGA cable news channel Newsmax, which more than doubled up Pavlich in the timeslot with 168,000 viewers for its panel show The Right Squad.
While NewsNation’s total viewership is still far behind that of the Big Three cable news channels and, for the most part, trails that of Newsmax, the five-year-old network did experience significant ratings growth in 2025.
“The data shows the cable news network’s prime-time programming totaled 108,000 viewers year-to-date and has grown 218% since NewsNation launched four years ago,” the network noted last month.
In an interview with The Guardian this week to hype her new show, Pavlich indicated that her close ties with MAGA world would help her bring high-profile names to the weeknight program – and perhaps attract new viewers to the network.
“I think we’ll be able to get some pretty significant administration officials, cabinet-level members,” she said. “We’re going to shoot for the stars and see where they fall – kind of thing.”
When asked if she was hoping to attract some of her viewers from Fox News, she said: “I’m looking forward to bringing over Katie Pavlich viewers, and also breaking into new viewership and introducing myself to the NewsNation.”
