Fox News gets a lot of derision from other media outlets, and it is tempting to assume that all the attacks are motivated by hatred of Fox’s right-leaning politics.
But perhaps we are underestimating another factor that may be just as important: Fox News is kicking their butts in the ratings.
Another day, another CNN ratings disaster. pic.twitter.com/WXeg7oNQtB
— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) August 13, 2025
It’s no secret that Fox is doing well, and CNN, in particular, is struggling, but when you take a look at the numbers, the difference is really stark.
Those numbers are BRUTAL. Look at Anderson Cooper vs Jesse Watters, and you have to wonder why he gets $18 million a year. Jake Tapper gets double his numbers, and he doesn’t hold a candle to Brett Baier. Laura Coates–anybody know who she is?–gets less than a quarter of Fox’s show at 11 p.m. In fact, Fox’s News at Night gets much higher ratings not just in its late-night slot, but than anything on CNN or MSNBC during Prime Time.
Not only is such failure costly–and boy is it costly!– but also embarrassing. If you are Jake Tapper or Anderson Cooper, getting lapped by Fox News must be a bit easier to take if you believe that Fox is cheating by telling its audience what it wants to hear.
And it’s not just that the liberal audience is split, while Fox gets the entire conservative base audience. Combine CNN and MSNBC, and the numbers still are far less than what Fox is routinely getting.
It’s easy to underestimate the power of resentment and cognitive dissonance in shaping people’s worldview. It may be that a lot of the nastiness toward Fox is less driven by animosity toward conservatives–there clearly is plenty of that–but by jealousy.
Audience laughs after Stephen Colbert tells CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that CNN is “objective” and “just reports the news as it is”
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 13, 2024
Fox is successful, and these other networks are has-beens. Blaming one’s failures on others is a tried-and-true tactic of losers. Coulda-shoulda-woulda may be small comfort, but it is SOME comfort to the losers. They are the Andy Bernard of The Office–a self-promoting loser who is always looking for validation and never deserving of it. Or George Costanza, perhaps, who only succeeds when he does the opposite of what his instincts tell him.
Only George knows he is a loser, while Brian Stelter thinks he is Jerry Seinfeld the newsman version.
Perhaps that is also why the entire media celebrity complex embraced Stephen Colbert when he was canceled. Rationally, any network losing tens of millions of dollars on a show would cancel it. But when CBS canceled Colbert, the celebrities howled and blamed politics. Occam’s Razor gives the obvious answer to the Colbert mystery–CBS doesn’t want to burn hundreds of millions of dollars on a loser–but celebrities can’t wrap their minds around the obvious, so they invent conspiracy theories.
Nobody wants to admit that America is not buying what they are selling.
So they blame Orange Man and Fox News.
