Fox News, CNN, MSNBC at the crossroads: What to know about cable news now

After the recent firing of Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson and CNN's Don Lemon, observers say cable news could be at one of those so-called "inflection points," or crossroads, that will lead to lasting and fundamental change.

Or — they concede — to none at all. The signals are conflicting, to be sure. 

CNN's "town hall" with former President Donald Trump, which aired  May 10 , marked his first return to the network in more than six years. While short of an unofficial detente — Trump has long called CNN "fake news" while the network challenged his numerous unfounded claims — it nonetheless surprised an industry accustomed to the standoff. (The day before the town hall, a federal jury in Manhattan found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.)

Over the past year, CNN has sought to distinguish itself from MSNBC and FNC by embracing hard news in prime time in lieu of "opinion" or red meat free-for-alls.

But did Trump's return to the fold hint at a reversal? Or was the town hall — as expected, a raucous encounter with a friendly audience that gave the former president a chance to double down on oft-stated lies about the last election — simply just a straight-up bid for Trump-bump ratings?

Then there's the Carlson situation.

More than a million viewers of FNC's 8 p.m. hour have disappeared since his April 24 ouster, which has left rare openings for left-leaning MSNBC and Newsmax, the far-right-wing network founded by Mineola native Chris Ruddy. Last Friday's 

There's no announced timetable for a Carlson replacement, but whoever steps in is likely to become the face of Fox News and, by default, the entire conservative TV news establishment — potentially a hybrid media-political power broker who wields as much influence in Washington as in prime time.

But as the Carlson fallout demonstrated, there are risks to such power, and consequences, too. After paying $787.5 million to settle the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit, Fox News may have lost an appetite for such risks. 

As the cable networks prepare for another bruising presidential campaign, they have some tough choices to make, but the questions before them may be even tougher.

Let's start with CNN's town hall. In a word, why? 

CNN critics have howled over this, and a recent Vanity Fair headline seemed to speak for them all: "The network says it's treating Trump like any other presidential candidate — but what does that look like for an indicted election truther?" 

By its very existence, those critics say a prime-time town hall confers legitimacy on Trump's latest bid for the White House. But in an interview with CNBC on May 5,  Discovery Warner CEO David Zaslav indicated that such legitimacy had already been conferred: "This is a new CNN," he said. "The U.S. has a divided government. We need to hear both voices." 

A CNN spokesperson said in a statement days before the town hall, "President Trump is the Republican front-runner, and our job despite his unique circumstances is to do what we do best. Ask tough questions, follow up, and hold him accountable to give voters the information they need to sort through their choices."

Still, TV town halls are rarely confrontational, and — within the broad spectrum of what passes for campaign news — tend to serve a campaign's purposes more than the TV news division airing it. But the May 10 event was a free-for-all, as Trump made claim after claim (about immigration, Title 42, the "border wall," abortion, the Carroll verdict) that host Kaitlan Collins either sought to rebut or clarify. In effect, the town hall was an extended déjà vu moment — a replay of so many Trump-media encounters during the past two election cycles, and likely foreshadowing what's to come.   

The town hall should help Trump, but how will it help — in Zaslav's words — the "new CNN"? 

The ratings were indeed big  (3.3 million viewers),  far bigger than they've been (CNN averaged 662,000 viewers in prime-time this past April). After forcing out former CNN president Jeff Zucker in early 2022 (when he acknowledged an undisclosed relationship with a subordinate), Zaslav hired a new president, Chris Licht, who has since revived the network's original mandate that "news is the star." Audience response has been tepid, perhaps because as Joe Peyronnin, a veteran CBS executive and the first president of Fox News, put it in a recent interview, "news isn't the star" on cable news any longer. "Conflict is the star." 

There was lots of that May 10. “CNN This Morning” host (recently named the network’s 9 p.m. host) Collins — who moderated from Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire — had been banned by Trump from a media conference in 2018. After Fox News and others came to her defense, the ban was lifted. Some of the animosity surfaced again on May 10, when Trump — at one point under repeated questions from Collins, which he declined to answer — the candidate called her a "nasty person." 

Let's head over to Fox, which fired Carlson on April 24 — a genuine shocker in the not-easily shocked world of cable news. Why was he canned?

There has been an enormous amount of speculation and solid reporting on this question, none of it conclusive. A May 3 New York Times story, for example, laid the entire debacle on some Carlson text that contained the line “that’s not how white men fight.” Then, Variety reported last week that his firing was a condition of the Dominion Voting Systems settlement, or per the trade. A board member told Carlson his firing was based on a “verbal agreement,” and “if Fox didn’t comply, the settlement was off,” according to the story. Dominion strongly refuted the story.

But there may also be an Occam’s razor solution to the lingering mystery of why Fox would fire a host — albeit one with this much notoriety — who drew more than 3 million viewers a week: That Fox, and chairman Rupert Murdoch, had finally had enough of the overwrought conspiracy theories Carlson promoted — one of which cost the company nearly a billion dollars.

There's a lingering question whether the 92-year-old Murdoch had even seen much of what Carlson and his other prime-time hosts were saying over the past year and a half. When Murdoch  was deposed in January as part of its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, Dominion lawyers asked him if he "believed" the company had tried to "delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump." He responded, “I’m open to persuasion; but, no, I’ve never seen it.” (Fox News declined to comment for this story.)

Does this firing suggest a turn to moderation at Fox News — a little less conspiracy-mongering, a little more fact-based opinion in prime-time? 

In the short term, maybe, if only because of a Dominion chilling effect, but unlikely in the long term. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch recently told investors there would be "no change" to the Fox News programming strategy, which is “obviously a successful strategy.”

Mark Feldstein, a former investigative reporter for CNN and ABC News — now chair of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism — said: "I'd love to be able to say that I thought what was happening [at CNN and Fox] is that we've entered a post-partisan age of TV journalism, and all that division is gone and they'll get back to solid news reporting — but I don't see that happening. These are for-profit companies and they'll do what makes money." 

Speaking of which, if earnings are depressed, might that force prime-time changes? 

If they were depressed, maybe but they're not. Cable TV news remains one of the great businesses of the media world. Virtually recession-proof, it's a machine that generates vast revenue streams from two sources — advertising and subscriber (or "affiliate") fees.

According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, Fox News got $4.2 billion in such fees last year, and another $1.4 billion in advertising. The network expects to renew two-thirds of its various cable agreements this year and next — and at a significant increase.

Why? Because as cable operators like Altice (which re-upped last October) continue to lose subscribers, popular networks like FNC theoretically forestall the decline. Out of the 127 networks ranked by USTVDB — an online database of show and network ratings — Fox News is ranked No. 7 while MSNBC is in ninth place and CNN in 22nd.

What about MSNBC and Newsmax?

Two networks that couldn't be further apart — in presentation, ideology, history and culture — are also affected by the changes at CNN and Fox News. Newsmax's prime-time ratings jumped to 334,000 viewers on April 30, a Sunday. That's nearly a 180,000 jump from the month before — a big one but hardly that much considering the overall picture.

By contrast, in April, FNC's prime-time was seen by an average 2.1 million viewers, down 12% from the year before — a troubling trend for Fox, by the way, which predated Carlson's exit. There have been sporadic reports that Newsmax is trying to lure Carlson, and other reports that say he has other plans. (Newsmax chief Ruddy could not be reached for comment.)

Then there's MSNBC, which averaged 1.3 million viewers in April, or over double CNN's average (568,000). But the week of Carlson's exit, MSNBC had 1.21 million prime-time viewers, or just behind FNC's 1.46 million.

The tumult, in other words, has been good for MSNBC — very good.

What's next for Carlson?

The former Fox News host announced on Twitter on May 9 that he'll be bringing a "new version" of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" to Twitter, but questions remained. Foremost, when? (He didn't say.) Or how? Axios has reported that Carlson's lawyers sent a letter to Fox saying "the noncompete provision in his contract is no longer valid." What's unclear is whether the Twitter show would breach the noncompete — although Twitter chief Elon Musk also tweeted that "I also want to be clear that we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever. Tucker is subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators."

And for Lemon?

Like Carlson, Lemon's next moves are complicated by the threat of pending litigation over his dismissal. Also like Carlson, he's retained an attorney — the same one, in fact, Bryan Freedman — which is an indication he plans to contest his forced departure. There are plenty of unknowns here, too. Did Lemon get a payout that would amount to "golden handcuffs" — keeping him off the air over a specific period of time — or is he free to explore his next TV move? Or Twitter one? Musk calls himself a "free speech absolutist," which at face value suggests he'd be happy to have Lemon on his platform, too. On May 10, he made a direct pitch to Lemon on (where else) Twitter: "Have you considered doing your show on this platform? Maybe worth a try. Audience is much bigger."

As for his immediate plans, he told "Extra" in late April: "I’m going to spend my summer on the beach [he has a home in Sag Harbor] and on the boat and with my family and just chill out and then I’ll see what happens next. But I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I can do that," he said, adding, "I don’t have to rush to another job, even if I want another job. I do. I want to work again. But I am lucky enough to be in a position where I don't have to worry about those things."

At the end of the day, is all this — the exits of Carlson and Lemon or CNN's maybe-thaw with Trump — a true "inflection point" or merely a soon-to-be forgotten blip in the rough-and-tumble world of cable TV news?

While Lemon and Carlson will be forever linked because they were fired (literally) within hours of one another, the circumstances were different (a particularly damaging Variety story in April, for example, reported on Lemon's history of "misogynistic and unprofessional behavior …") 

Nevertheless, Steve Krakauer, a former CNN digital producer, and author of the book, "Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People," makes the case that the departures are in fact related: "When trying to find a throughline that relates to both [hosts], perhaps it's the idea of trying to get ahead of [the] 2024 election, by getting rid of loose cannons, or people who color outside the lines of the direction their respective network is heading toward. For that reason, this does feel like a real pivotal moment, and I don't think it's over yet. There are more shoes to drop."