What To Know
- Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch said viewers are ‘fatigued and watching slightly less television.’
- In October, Fox’s primetime audience fell 28% year over year.
- Despite the decline, Fox drew more primetime viewers than CNN and MS NOW combined.
Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch has acknowledged that the news network’s ratings are down significantly year over year, but blamed this on “viewer fatigue” with television as a whole.
“We are seeing viewer fatigue,” Murdoch said during an earnings call on Monday (November 2), per the Financial Times. “They’re just fatigued and watching slightly less television.”
This follows a surprising drop in the ratings ahead of the midterm elections. Traditionally, the month before an election sees an increase in cable news viewership; however, Fox News saw its largest year-to-year ratings drop in a month before an election in the past 10 years, per The Hollywood Reporter.
In October, Fox News’ primetime ratings were down 28 percent in total viewers and down more than 30 percent in the key Adults 25-54 demographic compared to October 2025. It was a similar story across total day, with the network down 27 percent in total viewers and more than 30 percent in the demo from the previous year.
Even the network’s most-watched show, The Five, shed a million viewers from the same period last year. The show averaged 2.7 million viewers in October 2026, per Nielsen data, down from 3.7 million the year before.
According to RawStory, Murdoch told investors that last year’s numbers were up due to Donald Trump‘s inauguration and the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. He also compared the current news cycle to the 2006 midterms, when George W. Bush’s administration suffered heavy losses.
“We’ve seen this playbook before,” Murdoch said before adding that Fox News still attracts far higher numbers than its cable competition. In October, Fox drew more primetime viewers than CNN and MS NOW combined.
Murdoch made a dig at his rival networks, saying, “We do compete with broadcast news as opposed to our cable news peers. You can’t really call them peers.”
Fox News also touted its social media numbers, saying it attracted 3.8 billion YouTube views this year, compared to MS NOW’s nearly 3 billion.
And despite the drop in viewers, Murdoch revealed Fox has made more money in political advertising this midterm cycle than ever before. “This has clearly been a dramatically positive political revenue cycle across the board, and we’re the beneficiary of a lot of that,” he stated.
