After a heady start to the campaign season, news media are starting to see an increase in interest in political news thanks to an extraordinary series of stories in recent weeks.
The most obvious beneficiary is Fox News Channel, which is ending July with the highest number of viewers than any month since November 2020, according to the Nielsen company. The audience eclipsed all other networks, including broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC.
Between July 13 and 23, former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. President Joe Biden dropped his bid for re-election and Vice President Kamala Harris secured the support of enough Democrats to be the party’s presidential nominee.
“We just got back and we’ve been gone for a week,” Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” said Monday. “It’s been a week or a decade.”
More than 57 million people read news stories about the campaign on more than 2,000 news sites over the past 45 days, as measured by Taboola. That’s a 56% increase from the previous 45-day period, the company said. Trump was the No. 1 topic on news sites for most of 2024 until July — when Harris surpassed him, Taboola spokesman Dave Struzzi said.
Cable news ratings were about flat in the first six months of 2024 compared to 2023, and many online news sites saw numbers decline. Although cable television ratings have slumped in recent years as many consumers have pulled the plug on their subscriptions, that was still an ominous sign: news leaders had hoped a presidential election would spark more interest.
Fox’s average primetime viewership in July was 3.45 million, up 66% from the January-June average, Nielsen said. Viewership soared during coverage of the assassination attempt, and the feel-good Republican convention that crowned Trump — the favorite of many Fox viewers — drew more people than any other convention in Fox history.
More than 10 million people tuned into Fox because of Trump’s acceptance speech at the convention alone, Nielsen said.
Fox also led its news rivals in weekend coverage of Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. And CNN’s primetime average of 856,000 in July was 41% higher than the network average for the first six months of the year.
Meanwhile, MSNBC — which appeals primarily to a liberal audience — saw its fortunes deteriorate as Trump dominated the news cycle. July’s primetime average of 1.18 million was actually 3% lower than in the first six months of the year. MSNBC did not send its anchor team to Milwaukee for the GOP convention and seemed reluctant to show its audience much of what was happening there during much of the event.
However, Harris’ ascension significantly changed fortunes at MSNBC. In the week after Biden announced he was no longer running, the network’s primetime viewership rose to 1.7 million from about 1 million the week before, Nielsen said.
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him up http://twitter.com/dbauder.
