‘Newsmax Will Never Be as Powerful as Fox News’: CNN’s Don Lemon Predicts Upstart Conservative Network is Just a Flash in the Pan
If anybody would want to see the demise of Fox News, one would think it would be Don Lemon — the CNN Tonight anchor whose work is heavily criticized by Fox’s opinion hosts. (A search of the media monitoring service TVEyes reveals that Lemon has been invoked nearly once per day on Fox News over the past two months — seldom in a favorable light, to say the least.)
And yet, when presented with an opportunity to forecast Fox’s demise, Lemon declined — stating that the network will shrug off a rival which has gotten a lot of industry attention of late.
Speaking with Chris Cuomo during the handoff between their shows on Tuesday night, Lemon predicted that order will be restored to the broadcast world by March. And conservative upstart Newsmax will prove to be no threat to Fox’s longtime ratings supremacy, but rather, a flash in the pan.
“Newsmax will be Newsmax, but it won’t be as powerful as Fox News,” Lemon said. “It will never be as powerful as Fox News.”
The discussion came about when Cuomo noted that, for a single hour on Monday, Newsmax topped Fox News’ ratings in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic. Lemon argued that Fox has long had a monopoly on conservative viewers. And he believes they will again soon after some on the right are through playing with their shiny new toy.
“Fox News — here’s the thing that we’ve been dealing with — the other cable networks have had competition, right?” Lemon said. “The competition for people who said that they’re non-biased, they’re in the middle, they’re independent. Fox News didn’t have any competition because Fox News is the only far-right conservative network. Now they have some competition. So the playing field in some way is leveling. But it will moderate.”
Lemon did argue that Fox News will be a “shell of its former self.” But in the end, the CNN Tonight anchor believes the network will be a force to be reckoned with.
“[Fox will] still [be] very powerful,” he said.
Watch above, via CNN.
