Well, this is unexpected. While I knew Fox News was losing viewers (at least during the times when Tucker Carlson and the rest of the prime time lineup aren’t saving them), I didn’t expect a competing, right-leaning network to do this well, this soon against the conservative news giant.

Newsmax broke 1 million viewers for the first time ever. ‘Greg Kelly Reports’ was the happy recipient of what appears to be a wave of Republican viewers changing the channel.

Another record night for @Newsmax: For the first time, one of its shows topped the 1 million viewer mark, according to Nielsen TV ratings. "Greg Kelly Reports" averaged 1.06 million viewers at 7pm last night. Fox News averaged 2.06 million at the same hour.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 13, 2020

We are talking about a show that could measure its audience in only tens of thousands not too long ago. Now, Greg Kelly is doing half the viewership of Martha MacCallum’s show. In fact, ‘The Story’ got bested by Erin Burnett’s shown on CNN strongly in the key demo and the overall ratings. In other words, this isn’t just about Newsmax catching up. This is about Fox News’ hard news shows clearly losing their audience while other networks gain. Yes, Tucker Carlson is still pulling in 4.5 million a night, but he is hardly indicative of what viewers are angry about at Fox News. Rather, Tucker represents one of their only saving graces with conservative viewers right now. Any attempt at deflection from Fox News by citing Tucker and their prime time hosts, a group that the hard news side apparently sneers at, is just intellectual dishonesty.

In short, you can only spit in your audience’s face for so long before they begin to rebel, and the rebellion has clearly started. I’ve got another example of that coming up in a story later this evening that will further show how far Fox News has fallen, so don’t miss that.

Regardless, Newsmax has to be incredibly happy to see this kind of growth, and there’s no reason to think it’ll suddenly stop. OAN is a favorite among some conservatives as well, but they need a much better hard news side to really gain market share going forward. If I had a dollar for every time an OAN reporter has put out something that was clearly misleading, I’d be a rich man. I say that as someone who has fallen for a badly sourced story a time or two and had to go back and fix things on the site. I point that out to say that I don’t think the problem with Fox News is that they aren’t willing to gaslight conservatives with overly slanted coverage on their hard news programs. Conservatives have no problem being told things they don’t agree with if they are factual and fairly reported. What we don’t like is being spit on, sneered at, and mislead by censorship. Those are all things Fox News has done lately. They can either fix it or watch the collapse continue.

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)