Former GOP Rep. Devin Nunes thought he could continue his lying ways on Fox. Unfortunately, Howard Kurtz exposed his lie about Fox News ratings.
Fox News told the truth?
Devin Nunes has always been a liar and Trump sycophant. So the following statement was not a surprise.
“The way that I view it, Howie, is I think we have numbers now that are in, and you covered this,” Nunes said. “But, you know, just wasn’t that, you know, to put this in primetime, the numbers were way down. So I don’t understand how these, how these big corporations, you know, it was across, spread across some 20 different networks. When you compare Fox News which didn’t, which did not air that live, I mean just destroyed CNN and MSNBC in the ratings. Right there, direct competition.”
The man even speaks incoherently like Donald Trump. Of course, his statement on ratings was a lie. According to the New York Times,
An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.
By scheduling a congressional hearing for 8 to 10 p.m., committee members and Democrats were hoping to make the case to the biggest audience possible. ABC, CBS and NBC pre-empted their prime-time programming and went into special-report mode to cover it live.
Though the Thursday night figure pales next to presidential debates (63 million to 73 million) or this year’s State of the Union address (38 million), it’s still much larger than the audience that would normally watch a daytime congressional hearing. And it’s in the ballpark of television events like a big “Sunday Night Football” game or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
And Nunes lied about Fox News beating MSNBC. According to The Hollywood Reporter, here is how the real cable news networks did.
Per Nielsen, 20.04 million people watched the two-hour broadcast (not including on PBS, whose figures weren’t available as of publication time). A little over a quarter of that came from ABC, which averaged 5.22 million viewers over the two hours. MSNBC (4.3 million) came in second, followed by NBC (3.7 million), CBS (3.49 million) and CNN (2.74 million).
Fox News stuck with its usual opinion shows in primetime, commenting on the hearings but not showing them in full. It averaged 3.06 million viewers and a 0.45 rating in the 25-54 demo from 8-10 p.m. with Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity. Fox News’ chief political anchor, Bret Baier, led coverage on Fox Business, which averaged about 240,000 viewers over the two hours.
Yes, MSNBC beat Fox News handedly. And for a change, a Fox News host, Howard Kurtz, corrected him forcing him to be mum.
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