Tucker Carlson’s Weekly TV Ratings Rise Despite Boycotts

Fox News has cable’s biggest primetime audience for ninth-straight week

Tucker Carlson
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Last week, there were calls to fire Tucker Carlson from Fox News after old audio resurfaced of the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host making crude remarks about women and statutory rape on a shock-jock radio show. Also last week, Carlson’s Nielsen ratings rose 8 percent.

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged 3 million total viewers last week, with 517,000 of them coming from the key adults 15-54 demographic. Those Nielsen numbers were up 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively, from the prior week  — and they also easily beat MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” (1.8 million and 298,000) and CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” (1 million and 269,000).

In the demo, Carlson’s week was down 2019-to-date and versus the same week in 2018.

As a whole, Fox News had another big week in terms of viewership. Across primetime, which for Fox is a Carlson/Sean Hannity/Laura Ingraham lineup, FNC averaged 2.387 million total viewers, with 401,000 in the 25-54 demo. March 11 through March 17 marked nine straight weeks for Fox as the No. 1 cable network.

Below are channels ranking 2 through 5 in primetime-audience averages:
2.    ESPN (1,935,000)
3.    MSNBC (1,868,000)
4.    HGTV (1,283,000)
5.    History (1,180,000)

CNN checked in at eleventh in primetime, averaging 939,000 total viewers for the important day part.

The latest outcry against Carlson arose after liberal watchdog group Media Matters dropped a compilation of years’ worth of audio that documented Carlson’s regular appearances on the the radio show of 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.”

See how his advertisers responded here.

Back in December, Carlson lost sponsors after saying that immigrants made the United States a “poorer” and “dirtier” country. He subsequently shed some 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.

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