Fox News Quickly Cuts Away From Trump Speech After He Rips Into Network and Touts Tucker Carlson
Fox News cut away from former President Donald Trump’s rally speech right as the 2024 candidate began praising his interview with Tucker Carlson and blasting the network’s ratings on the first GOP debate.
Trump opted to skip the first GOP debate hosted by Fox News, instead sitting down with Carlson for a one-on-one interview for his Twitter show.
Trump’s speech in South Carolina on Monday had been carried on the network for a long stretch of time, even leading into the top of the hour of The Story with Martha MacCallum.
It wasn’t until the former president began talking about his appearance on Carlson’s show, 13 minutes into his speech, that the network promptly cut away.
The 2024 candidate began boasting about leading the polls when he brought up the topic of debates.
“We’re going up and we’re the only ones going up. They’re going down and they’re going down, down, down. They ought to stop wasting their time. You know, they’re wasting a lot of time with these ridiculous debates that nobody’s watching,” Trump said.
“Their last debate was the lowest rated debate in history. That’s a good compliment. Now, what was I doing — I was someplace else, wasn’t I? I was doing another interview. We had 271 million people listening to the Tucker Carlson interview. That’s an all-time record,” Trump said.
As the crowd began cheering, Fox News host Martha MacCallum cut in.
“So here we are, back in the thick of campaign season. We are now just four months away from the Iowa primaries. And you see former President Trump in a place where you would expect to see him today and in the days to come, South Carolina,” MacCallum said.
Despite Trump’s fanciful claims that “271 million people” were listening to his Carlson interview, Twitter’s measurement of a “view” is much different from what you would expect.
A view “simply is a record of each time a person (or bot) scrolls past a tweet,” Mediaite reported in August. “Notably, the count does not indicate who actually watched the interview and will also count the same person viewing the tweet multiple times.”
According to Nielsen ratings, the debate on Fox News brought in 12.8 million total viewers.
The debate was broadcast on Fox Business Network, Fox News Digital, and Fox Nation, bringing the total viewership to 13 million. It was the “highest-rated non-sports cable telecast of 2023 and topping more than 70% of all presidential primary debates in the last two cycles (2016 and 2020),” per Fox News.
Watch above via The Story with Martha MacCallum.
