Lachlan Murdoch Notes Fox News “Viewer Fatigue” Around Midterms Amid Year-Over-Year Viewership Declines

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch Monday talked of viewer fatigue among the Fox News audience with the the midterm cycle heading to a close.

“We are seeing some viewer fatigue, which we’ve seen before. This cycle is analogous, not entirely but somewhat analogous to the 2006 midterms, when you have a second-term president going into their midterms halfway through the second term, and you just see this viewer fatigue,” he told analysts on a call after the company posted terrific quarterly numbers led by a 47% jump in ad revenue driven in part by political advertising (as well as the FIFA World Cup and Tubi).

He was responding to an analysts question about Nielsen reporting some ratings declines at Fox News ahead of the Tuesday elections.

“But having said that,” Murdoch stressed, “Those viewers are not going to any other news channel. They’re not switching to MS Now, or to CNN. They’re just, you know, fatigued and watching slightly less television overall. So, so we feel pretty confident where we are, and we’ve seen the playbook, and we know how to move through it.”

Fox News still leads its cable news rivals by a wide margin, but October’s numbers again showed a year-over-year decline. Its primetime audience was down 28% and total day down 27%, while MS NOW and CNN posted gains. The network saw a viewership drop in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, but recovered the next year.