“Sunday Morning Futures,” Fox News’ business- and policy-oriented Sunday morning show hosted by Maria Bartiromo, scored another ratings victory last year as the No. 1 weekend show in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 age demographic in all of cable news.
For all of 2019, “Sunday Morning Futures” averaged 261,000 viewers in that demographic, just ahead of Fox News’ “Watters’ World,” which averaged 259,000.
The show has also been the top show in all of cable Sunday at 10 a.m. ET for three consecutive years in total viewers. In 2019, it averaged 1.478 million viewers in the time slot — dwarfing rivals like MSNBC’s “AM Joy” (840,000 total viewers, 135,000 in the demo) and CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” (777,000 total viewers, 166,000 in the demo).
“The audience trusts the credibility of the program,” Bartiromo told TheWrap when discussing the ratings wins, noting she knows her audience demographics and has tried to create the show around that specific audience’s wants since she joined Fox’s networks in 2014.
“When I first came here, my vision was to do a show that was sort of the meeting place of policy, politics and business and to bring those subjects together to try and look at the political economy, try to look at policy impact on the economy,” she told TheWrap, a few minutes after ending an episode of her Fox Business Network program, “Mornings With Maria,” that featured “Real Housewives” star Bethenny Frankel talking about relief for the raging Australian wildfires. A few days prior, she interviewed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“My first priority is my audience,” said Bartiromo, who has drawn criticism for interviews with President Donald Trump that many called softball while Trump himself has called her questioning too harsh. “What does my audience want to hear? What is going to be helpful to the audience?”