Fox News Crushes Cable News Ratings In October, Leads All Of Television In 2025

It’s shaping up to be quite a year at Fox News. The long-dominant force in cable news has transformed itself into the most-watched network in all of television, with just-released October ratings showing that Fox has held its lead over all of the broadcast networks in prime time. Since the start of the year, Fox News has averaged 3.281 million viewers in weekday prime, just ahead of ABC (3.252 million viewers), CBS (3.104 million viewers) and NBC (3.087 million viewers).

In October, Fox News delivered an average prime time audience of 2.3 million viewers, while its cable news competitors CNN and MSNBC fell to record lows. MSNBC was second overall with 815,000 total viewers in prime (down 41% from the same period one year ago) and CNN had an average audience of 504,000 viewers (down 39%)–CNN’s second lowest-rated October on record.

CNN’s prime time lineup was shaken by record lows in October, with The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Laura Coates Live and Anderson Cooper 360 all posting all-time lows for October among viewers 25-54, the key demographic valued by advertisers.

The phenomenon that is The Five

The most-watched program in all of cable news in October was–again–Fox News Channel’s The Five, which drew an average audience for the month of 3.692 million viewers, crushing the competition and also putting The Five into first place across all of television in the 5 p.m. time slot, a remarkable achievement for a show that airs outside of prime time, when television viewership is typically highest.

The Five’s ratings performance for the month beat traditional broadcast prime time shows like NBC’s Law and Order: SVU (3.5 million viewers) and ABC’s 9-1-1 Nashville (3.3 million viewers).

ForbesHarris Faulkner Beats ‘The View’ As Fox News Sets Ratings RecordBy Mark Joyella

Following The Five, the most-watched cable news shows were all on Fox, with Jesse Watters Primetime in second place with 3.073 million viewers, followed by Gutfeld! (2.825 million viewers), Special Report with Bret Baier (2.768 million viewers), and Hannity (2.567 million viewers).

FNC’s Gutfeld! continued to dominate the broadcast networks’ late night shows, including ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2.1 million viewers), CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2.1 million viewers) and NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (1.2 million viewers).

Bret Baier’s Special Report now rivals the legacy broadcast evening newscasts

FNC’s Special Report, the network’s key evening newscast, finished October outperforming the CBS Evening News in 19 major markets across the country, including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The broadcast evening newscasts have remained remarkably competitive, drawing much larger viewership than cable news, making Special Report’s performance noteworthy–and making it easy to see why recently-named CBS News chief Bari Weiss mused about hiring away Baier to take over CBS’ flagship program (In a podcast interview this week, Baier said he was flattered, but happy at Fox, where he recently extended his contract).

Among viewers in the key demo, Fox News led in prime with an average audience of 228,000 viewers (down 36% from one year ago), well ahead of CNN (77,000 viewers, down 39%) and MSNBC (73,000 viewers, down 41%).

ForbesIs Fox News Channel’s Greg Gutfeld The Next King Of Late Night TV?By Mark Joyella

Gutfeld! was the highest-rated show on cable news in the key demo, finishing October with an average audience of 325,000 viewers, followed by The Five (304,000 viewers), Jesse Watters Primetime (295,000 viewers), Hannity (251,000 viewers) and Special Report (249,000 viewers)–all according to ratings data compiled by Nielsen and its Nielsen Big Data + Panel.

Fox News dominated broadcast and cable television ratings all summer

October’s ratings performance raises the very real possibility that Fox News will make history by ending the year as the most-watched network in all of television, especially since Fox has been punching above its weight all summer, outperforming ABC, CBS and NBC.

Shows like Hannity and The Ingraham Angle reach far fewer American homes than the broadcast networks do, and yet FNC spent the summer outdelivering reliably high-rated fare like ABC’s The Bachelor, Discovery’s “Shark Week,” and NBC’s American Ninja Warrior.

“It’s very satisfying to see that we’ve worked all these years to build something like this, and now it’s right up there beating the other networks,” Fox News President Jay Wallace told me in an interview in July. “It’s not just politics, it’s not just hard news, it’s not just opinion, it’s everything.”

ForbesFox News Tops ABC, NBC And CBS As The Highest-Rated Network This SummerBy Mark Joyella

Winning across the summer–while impressive for a cable network–shows that live news and opinion programming, especially in an unusually fast-paced year for news, can draw more nightly viewers than repeats of broadcast shows. But extending that ratings performance on a full-year basis would represent a shift in viewership. Both cable and broadcast television are struggling in an era when viewers watch much less live television and opt instead for streaming their favorite shows, but Fox is still flexing its ability to draw millions of viewers every night.

Fox Corporation executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch believes viewers are seeing Fox News the way he sees it: as more than just a cable news channel. Back in March, Murdoch told the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that “it’s important to note that we don’t see Fox News anymore as just a news service. We see it as one of the top five broadcast networks in the United States, even though we don’t have the same distribution that broadcast has.”