Sunday, Nov. 15, 2020
Did Trump coverage make Fox News the highest-rated cable news network?
Fox News was the highest-rated U.S. cable news network long before Donald Trump began his presidential campaign—having maintained the #1 spot against CNN, MSNBC and others for almost 19 years.
Trump's presidency, and the 2020 campaign, have no doubt helped sustain its success. Fox prime-time shows set new records in October as the election date drew near. Tucker Carlson's hour averaged 5.3 million viewers during the month, a cable TV record. Carlson "is arguably the most polarizing personality on cable news," Adweek observed. "But the folks who love his show watch it religiously."
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.
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