Kudlow’s ratings decline at Fox Business after strong start

William Cohan writes for Institutional Investor about how former CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow is fitting in at Fox Business.

Cohan writes, “Presumably, the TV overlords want to see an increasing slope of viewership over time. Perhaps thanks to Mnuchin, and others, Kudlow came out of the box strong: The February 19 ratings had Kudlow’s 4:00 show at 235,000 viewers, about a third of what Dobbs used to command. ‘Not terrible,’ says one longtime cable executive. (The consistent winner on Fox Business in the post-Dobbs era is Stuart Varney, who is on from 9:00 a.m. to noon weekdays and gets about 250,000 viewers for his show.)

“By the third week of March, though, Kudlow’s numbers were down to about 150,000 viewers while Varney’s show was hitting nearly 300,000. When Kudlow reairs at 7:00 p.m., it attracts about 75,000 viewers. By the end of March, according to Fox, the show had settled into a daily viewership of about 190,000 people. Fox has declared victory. Not only has Kudlow delivered more viewers — and more prosperous viewers — to Fox Business in the 4:00 p.m. time slot, Fox claims that he has also swiped 7 percent of CNBC viewers during that time period. Fox has said that since it began airing on Fox Business, Kudlow’s show has become the tenth-most-watched show on business television. (Disclosure: I have been a paid CNBC contributor since 2018.)

“A bigger concern than ratings is whether Kudlow will ultimately be able to fit into the Fox ethos of culture wars and bashing everything Biden, from rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement to the ‘Iran Deal Disaster,’ as a chyron at the bottom of Kudlow’s show read one day recently. Is Kudlow just ‘another horn in the trumpet section?,’ wonders one longtime former cable television executive.”

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