"The days can go on with regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next. A long continuous chain. Then suddenly, there is a change."
The quote, of course, comes from Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, whose personality and "take" might fit just fine in today's wild cable news environment ... which also just so happens to be the subject we're discussing here.
After dominating cable news ratings for what seems like forever, Fox News is quite suddenly vulnerable in a post-Tucker Carlson era during which even core constituents are questioning the right-wing channel's conservative bonafides. Fox may have been surpassed for the first time in 120 weeks in primetime audience performance on a seven-day basis earlier this month by MSNBC, but Fox did hold off its more left-leaning rival to finish No. 1 for the month.
According to Nielsen data provided by the Penske showbiz trades, Fox News averaged 1.49 million viewers during the almost-wrapped month of June, down 31% from the same period of 2022, but ranking ahead of surging MSNBC, which averaged 1.32 million viewers (up 3%).
Also-struggling CNN, which saw its top executive, Chris Licht, fired earlier in June, averaged just 635,000 viewers in prime time, down 3%.
The race was even narrower among the key adults 25-54 demo, with Fox News down 54% year over year to a 148,000-viewer average, just enough to nip MSNBC's 144,000 viewer average (up 6%).
CNN averaged 129,000 viewers in the key demo and was down 12%.
In addition to the corrosive forces of cord-cutting, incumbents like Fox News are battling new platforms. Fired 8 p.m. star Carlson is now producing an iteration of his talk show on Twitter, stripping away portions of the linear channel's core audience.
CNN, meanwhile, appears to be in worse shape, its identity torn between an audience -- and newsroom -- that seems to want real reporting, and an upper management that wants to placate older conservative viewers with a linear playbook that no longer seems to work.
