Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch told investors this week that Fox News Channel’s year-over-year ratings have slipped, but insisted the network’s audience isn’t jumping ship to its competitors.
Speaking on the company’s quarterly earnings call Monday, Murdoch attributed the decline to “viewer fatigue” after a news-heavy year, saying Americans are simply watching less television overall.
“Those viewers are not going to any other news channel,” Murdoch said, according to the Washington Post. “They’re not switching to MS NOW or to CNN.”
Fox News remains the dominant force in cable news. The network drew 1.7 million prime-time viewers during the week of Oct. 19, while MS NOW and CNN each pulled audiences in the hundreds of thousands.
Still, Nielsen data released Oct. 30 showed Fox’s prime-time audience down 23% from a year earlier, while MS NOW and CNN both posted gains of roughly 30% over the same period.
The numbers arrive at a challenging political moment. President Trump’s approval rating has dipped into the 30s, and Republicans headed into Tuesday’s midterm elections facing deep voter frustration over the economy.
An NBC News poll released Tuesday found nearly 90% of voters concerned about the cost of gas, food, utilities and health care, and just under 8 in 10 said inflation is causing hardship for their families. Sixty-two percent said the president bears responsibility for high prices, and 65% said his policies have made the economy worse.
Forty-four percent of voters said their personal finances are worse than two years ago, when Trump returned to the White House. Only 18% said they’re better off. Three-quarters described the national economy as in rough shape, a sharp reversal from 2018, when 68% of voters said the economy was in good shape during Trump’s first term.
Economic anxiety has been especially pronounced among younger Americans. A September Fortune report found that while Generation Z may out-earn previous generations at the same age, inflation, living costs and housing affordability have created significant economic uncertainty.
Older Americans feel it too. A Fortune report published Nov. 1 found more than 70% of Generation X fear running out of money to support their families more than they fear death.
The generational debate played out on Fox’s own airwaves in July, when then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt joined Jesse Watters in prime time. Asked whether Gen Z was lazy for not backing the GOP, Leavitt, who was born in 1997, the first year of Gen Z according to Pew Research Center, said her generation and those younger had been “raised with just silver spoons in their mouths” and grown used to “getting everything handed to them.”
“That’s not the values this country was built on,” Leavitt said, pointing to meritocracy, hard work and “pulling yourself up from your bootstraps.”
The remarks drew pushback, including from Nalin Haley, the 24-year-old son of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
“Ironically, calling an entire generation lazy instead of addressing real problems with cost of living, housing, and employment … IS LAZY,” Haley wrote on X the following day.
Haley argued neither party has properly addressed the issue, writing that “the party that actually starts listening to real everyday Americans first is the party of the future.”
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