Despite the renewed calls to #FireTuckerCarlson over his inflammatory comments in recently resurfaced old interviews, the Fox News host remains very popular among cable news viewers.
So far in 2019, Carlson’s 8 p.m. program on the Fox News Channel is averaging 2.9 million total viewers per episode, which is 41 percent more than Chris Hayes on MSNBC and a whopping 122 percent more than CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
In the key ratings demographic, which for primetime news programming is adults ages 25-54, Carlson averages 525,000 viewers, per Nielsen. That’s 37 percent more than Cooper and 46 percent more than Hayes.
Carlson’s audience this year is not only larger than his direct competition’s, it is larger than anything in the 8 p.m. hour on all of cable. Yes, that includes ESPN, HGTV and everything else.
The viewership continues despite an outcry over a December episode in which he said that immigrants made the United States a “poorer” and “dirtier” country — a comment that led at least two dozen sponsors to pull ads from the show.
He subsequently lost more advertisers after suggesting that high-earning women had become a cause for social ills in the U.S. and warned that men would not want to marry them.
The latest outcry arose after liberal watchdog group Media Matters on Sunday dropped a compilation of years’ worth of audio that documented Carlson’s regular appearances on the the radio show of Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge between 2006 and 2011. In the recordings, Carlson made disparaging remarks about women, including calling television host Alexis Stewart “c–ty.”
Carlson addressed the audio on Sunday evening, telling critics they were welcome to come on his show and take issue with him directly. He did not apologize.
“Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago,” Carlson said, sidestepping the fact that some clips were as recent as 2011. “Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”
Carlson will appear as scheduled on his show tonight, according to Fox News.