Donald Trump spent part of Wednesday counting who gets airtime on Fox News, and he wasn’t pleased. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Jessica Tarlov, and “every Democrat” get more of it than “Pro Republicans,” which is why “MAGA, and REAL Patriots, will never like Fox!”
Trump hammering Fox News on Truth Social over its coverage isn’t terribly new. What is new, however, is a Thursday morning AP-NORC poll showing Trump at his lowest approval rating in history across both terms, with only 31% in favor of the sitting president. Worse? 26 percent approve of his handling of the economy, the lowest the poll has recorded for him in either term, and 17 percent approve of how he’s handled the cost of living. Sixty-five percent blame his policies for high prices, and about six in ten Republicans now disapprove of him on costs, up from about half in April.
In perhaps related news, Fox News is currently losing viewers at the precise moment Trump’s numbers are falling through the floor. Causation or correlation? I don’t see how you look at one data set without seeing the other in it.
Fox News put out its third-quarter ratings Wednesday, hours before the president’s post, and the release leads with… CBS? Fox News averaged 2.4 million weekday primetime viewers to CBS’s 2 million, The Five logged its 20th straight quarter as the most-watched show in cable news, and total day is pacing toward the network’s most-watched midterm year ever. All accurate.
What the release doesn’t say is that they’ve focused on a different comparison. Fox News has seemingly beaten CNN and MS NOW combined in both demo and total viewers forever, but now holds that lead only in the latter. In the 25-to-54 demo, the audience advertisers pay for, Fox News averaged 183,000 in primetime for the quarter. CNN and MS NOW together averaged 185,000. Yes, Fox News is still very much dominant, but recently it has become less so. And having followed cable news ratings longer than I care to admit, I’ve found that viewer trends are often more newsworthy than the actual ratings. And the current trend for Fox News neatly follows Trump’s approval rating.
Against the same quarter last year, Fox News was down roughly 18 percent in total primetime viewers and 25 percent in the demo. August is the cleanest month to compare, since nothing unusual happened in either year, and Fox News was down 8 percent in total viewers and 21 percent in the demo while CNN and MS NOW both grew. September looks far worse, down 32 and 44, but last September included the week of Charlie Kirk’s killing, when everybody’s numbers spiked, so I’d discount it. Even discounted, CNN and MS NOW came in flat against last September. Fox News is the one that fell.
Now, to be fair, it’s easier to post double-digit gains when your viewership is smaller, and conversely, Fox News’s audience has been so outsized for so long that a decline in numbers feels as predictable as the laws of gravity. What goes up eventually comes down. But that does not make it coming down any less noteworthy, particularly in this political climate where Trump, the man they've largely gotten behind, is also in a metaphorical death spiral.
Fox News has seen dips in ratings that coincided with Trump’s unpopularity before (January 2021, when it was in third place), but bounced back even stronger.
The network now sees itself competing with broadcast rather than its cable news competitors and insists that 2026 is on track to be its highest-rated midterm year. Concerns over a dearth of younger viewers are answered by the network’s digital growth, which offers a decent salve to cable viewer declines. They can boast 3.4 billion YouTube views this year, more than any competitor, as well as a TikTok following that more than doubled in a year to 11.67 million. Those numbers show Fox News is a much bigger business than its cable channel.
What might be more revealing than the audience data, however, is the actual programming changes apparent to any Fox News viewer over the past several weeks.
Fox News has always needed a villain, and for twenty years casting was easy. Democrats, the government, the media, some combination of the three, and all of them conveniently outside the building. Wedge issues like media bias, immigration, and crime are still all over Fox News rundowns in the same way Stairway to Heaven is still played on classic rock stations, but they don’t land like they used to.
What’s got Fox News viewers outraged are the same issues that made them angry in 2024. Gas prices are up to roughly $4.50 a gallon, and grocery bills are up 3.4 percent since January 2025. There is the unpopular and disastrous war with Iran (which has caused the high prices) and a recent spike in alarm over unchecked AI. All point directly to the guy who’s been Fox News’ leading man for the past decade, Donald Trump. When he sat down with Fox News in early August, he insisted that grocery prices were “all coming down.” PolitiFact checked a week later and found them up 3.4 percent since he took office. Go figure.
The news side of Fox News hasn’t entirely ducked any of this. Brit Hume told Special Report viewers on September 16 that prices were “just killing this administration and the president’s party,” which is about as direct as Hume gets. The opinion hours are a different story. I searched Fox News transcripts over the last week for various subjects, and the results were revealing. The drug “kratom” came up 521 times. The term “Clancy” came up 334 times. “Gas prices” got 154 mentions, “inflation” 152, “Hormuz” 181 and “diesel” 61.
In other words, a gas station-sold designer drug that most viewers hadn’t heard of a month ago got more airtime than gas prices, inflation, and diesel put together.
I’m not saying kratom deaths and a murder trial aren’t stories. They are, and so is a war that made a tank of gas cost way more to the average Fox News viewer. But Fox News programmers seem to have decided which of those got the hours last week, and viewers who usually dialed in to midterm coverage are tuning out much the same way ardent sports fans stop watching a game their team is losing in a rout.
Meanwhile, Peter Navarro has spent the past month desperately trying to gin up a fight with Fox News over Maria Bartiromo’s ouster, which looks far more like a pressure campaign for friendlier coverage than a principled stance on legally dangerous election denialism coverage. That sort of thing only works when you’re negotiating from strength, and a president at 31 percent picking a fight with the most influential outlet in cable news five weeks before the midterms is trying to strong arm the one insitution it most desperately needs.
So Trump is squeezing Fox News from both ends. The opinion hosts are expected to defend an increasingly unpopular populist presidency that’s disappointing the very people that tune in, and then the president turns around and tells those same people the network isn’t loyal enough to deserve them.
Of course, Fox News can keep changing the subject, and maybe it has a brighter future as a True Crime outlet, a larger heir to Court TV. What it can’t do is make the grocery bill go away, or satisfy a thin-skinned president who treats Jessica Tarlov’s airtime as a personal betrayal.
Trump spent a decade making himself indispensable to Fox News, and the network went off for the symbiotically lucrative ride. But he’s now giving the network every business reason to find out whether his viewers matter enough to ignore what most of their audience is seeing with their own eyes and tune to other outlets as a result.