After Joe Biden nabbed a win in the COVID-era presidential election of 2020, conservatives were peeling away from Fox News — partially encouraged by Donald Trump — while upstart challengers like Newsmax and One America News were among those looking to woo the MAGA base that was said to think that Fox was insufficiently right-wing in its perspective.
What a difference four years makes. Days ago, President-elect Trump gladhanded Sean Hannity at Fox’s annual Patriot Awards on Dec. 5, held this year in Brookville, New York, while claiming the “Patriot of the Year” honor and giving a speech that served to cement the next era of collaboration between the incoming administration and the Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch-controlled media empire.
That Fox News empire has been on a high since the election, with the channel up 7 percent in primetime while its rivals CNN (down by 46 percent) and MSNBC (down 52 percent) saw declines as viewers tune in for the flurry of surprising Trump picks for cabinet officials. And, during a conference hosted by the investor bank UBS on Monday, Fox Corp CFO Steve Tomsic struck an optimistic note about the company’s cable news offerings. It’s a far cry from last year when the network settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million on the eve of trial over the stolen 2020 election claims made on its airwaves.
“We have maintained and grown share both in primetime as well as total-day, if you look at the three or four weeks that have passed since the election vs where we were in the month leading up to the election,” Tomsic told UBS moderator John Hodulik. “If I look at just share of cable news, if I look at it from a year-to-date perspective, we’re in the mid 50s percent, if I look at it from a quarter-to-date perspective were kind of 60 percent share. If I look at it for just the month of November, we’re at 62 percent of cable news. If I look at it in certain weeks in November, we’ve been at the 70 percent mark. So from our perspective, Fox News has never been stronger from a ratings perspective.”
While CNN has been undergoing its own transformation toward a digital-first future under owner Warner Bros. Discovery and MSNBC faces the prospect of a spin off from Comcast by the end of 2025, Tomsic painted Fox as already having dealt with its own corporate rework since Fox was split up in 2019 with the sale of most assets to Disney and the refocus of the business on news and sports.
And the CFO also revisited a narrative about Fox News that was debated a year ago when Tucker Carlson was ousted and Laura Ingraham was moved to 7 p.m. ET, Jesse Watters took over Carlson’s 8 p.m. spot and Greg Gutfeld moved to 10 p.m. Namely, whether the Fox brand is bigger than the personalities it has created.
“This time last year, we were talking about a lot of changes to our primetime lineup in Fox News and sort of ‘do personalities trump the brand?’ and yet again we shown that the brand trumps the personalities,” Tomsic said. “Fox News, from a channel standpoint, as well as the broader assets we have around Fox News — whether it be the business channel, Nation, the digital website — are all firing on all cylinders at the moment.”
The CFO also said the channel has been drawing more than just its conservative base. “There’s no doubt that we are getting new viewers,” Tomsic claimed. “People think that Fox News is just the conservatives of the United States. It’s not. We capture more than our fair share of undecideds, we even capture more than our share of Democratic-leaning voters, so I think it’s new viewers as well as some of the competition struggling a bit. Which is why, I think in many respects, we compare ourselves less with cable news peers and look at Fox News to see how far we can take it from a comparison with broadcast.”
Year-to-date, Fox Corp stock is up around 55 percent, outpacing far bigger rivals that have seen growth (Disney is up 26 percent) as it benefited from a surge in political advertising this year. On Nov. 4, the company reported its latest quarterly earnings, which showed an 11 percent rise in its advertising revenue to more than $1.3 billion.