Kevin Williamson of National Review Online reminds us about the limited impact of cable news programming.
Two facts that seem contradictory but are both true: (1) Tucker Carlson has the most-watched cable-news show in the country, and (2) basically nobody watches Tucker Carlson.
Last year, Carlson’s Fox News program averaged 3.2 million viewers a night, making it an absolute ratings juggernaut by current cable-news standards but reaching fewer than 1 percent of our nation’s 330 million people. Going by that 2021 average, Carlson has a far smaller audience than does, say, Judge Steve Harvey (4.5 million) or reruns of Young Sheldon (4.3 million). …
… None of this is to piss on Carlson’s show or on Fox News — Carlson leads the list, and seven of the top ten cable-news programs in 2021 were Fox offerings. (The other three of the top ten were on MSNBC.) The channel and its most popular host clearly know what they are doing. But we live in a very fractured media landscape, and the most widely shared points of cultural reference are not the cable-news mouthholes.
Without passing any judgment on the artistic merits of Young Sheldon, that is probably a good thing. People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people. But they do have a relatively big footprint in our politics. …
… We’ve been talking about that “fractured media landscape” for a few decades now. But the fractures seem to be getting deeper. The news environment in 2004 was not very much like what it was in the heyday for the Big Three networks, … but Dan Rather was still a big enough cultural presence at that time that his fraudulent report on George W. Bush’s military service — a pre-election hit piece — became a momentary national obsession. …
… But Dan Rather today — 90 years old and bonkers as he is — probably remains more widely known than most of the leading television-news figures of our time. My media friends were very interested in the Chris Cuomo story, but when I asked my non-media friends about that teapot tempest, the almost universal response was: “Who?”
