Soon after last November's election, an odd meme took hold.  On the conservative right, it had suddenly become fashionable to hate Fox News, largely because of Trump-supporters' disappointment in how the channel reported the election results and the aftermath.  Many people were advocating boycotting Fox News and even ditching it altogether.  I argued then that no news outlet is perfect and that Fox News represented the only major competitive mainstream news outlet that had not become totally corrupt and completely captured by the radical left.

One of my blog posts about this development at American Thinker, to put it mildly, was not well received.  In fact, I got more blowback because of that piece than from anything else I had written at AT since 2007.  A lot of it was ugly.

The ratings for the three major cable news channels — Fox, CNN, and MSNBC — also shifted during the three months after the election.  For the first time in almost two decades, Fox News lost its commanding lead, and CNN and MSNBC were ahead.

Eventually, that changed, and Fox is now back on top — comfortably.  Meanwhile, CNN has lost 50% of its target audience since January — a huge deficit.

As the Biden administration settles in, the core conservative opinion programs on Fox News — anchored by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Hilton, Mark Levin, Jesse Watters, Jeanine Pirro, and others — and the A-list conservative contributors who constitute a majority of the talking head guests on the channel — are unrivaled anywhere.

Tucker Carlson, who has the #1 rated program on Fox News.  (Source: Fox News.)

Of particular note is the work of Tucker Carlson.  His nightly program Tucker Carlson Tonight has fearlessly taken on the articles of faith of the woke, the cancel culture, and other elements of the Marxist left that now controls the Democrat party and virtually all of the power centers of modern life including academia, the media, and popular culture.  What the left doesn't yet totally dominate, like the Supreme Court, it is trying to pack so it will have a permanent leftist majority.

In recent weeks, Carlson has been the target of increasing attacks — including demands that Fox News fire him and that advertisers boycott his program.  In response, Fox News has given Carlson unequivocal support and three additional new programs every week on the subscription Fox Nation internet channel with new episodes uploaded on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Ironically, many of the harshest critics of Fox News after the election now routinely tweet what Carlson is doing and share clips from his show.

The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton on Sundays has also been a standout.  In a series of exclusive reports, Hilton has broken major news on Dr. Anthony Fauci's involvement in supporting gain of function virus research including in Communist China.  According to many observers, that is related to the genesis or cause of the Wuhan virus, as either a bioweapon or an unintended release of the results of dangerous deadly research that was covered up by the Communist Chinese.

Meanwhile, Newsmax TV and One America News — the two other smaller conservative news channels — have yet to live up to the expectations of the Fox News detractors.  In fact, Newsmax gave the bum's rush to My Pillow founder Mike Lindell when he appeared on the channel and tried to talk about election fraud.

In the case of CNN, last week, Project Veritas released secretly recorded videos of a CNN technical producer in which the individual admitted that CNN's mission was to destroy Donald Trump and also hype the coronavirus pandemic to make Trump look bad leading up to the election.  The mainstream media ignored this news, but Veritas founder James O'Keefe appeared three nights in a row on Hannity's Fox News program to show the videos and discuss them.

By the way, tonight — Monday, April 19 — at 9 P.M. E.T., Hannity's program on Fox News will devote the entire hour to the host's sit-down interview with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.  It will be the former president's first in-person on-camera interview since he left office.  Most of the rest of his interviews since January have been on the phone on Fox News.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about another instance of a black eye for CNN when its departing daytime host, Brooke Baldwin, gave a series of interviews criticizing CNN as male-dominated and not sufficiently respectful of its female employees, especially the on-air talent like her.  Fox News, meanwhile, was the first cable news channel to elevate a woman, Suzanne Scott, to the top leadership position in 2018.  Scott had worked her way up through the company since it started a quarter-century ago.  This news got hardly any coverage in the MSM.

Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News and the Fox Business Network.

People are obviously entitled to their own opinions about cable news channels and everything else.  But I suggest that I was correct in sticking with Fox News last fall and suggesting that the momentary ratings high tide would eventually turn again against CNN and MSNBC and Fox News would rebound.  These days, with the Republican Party largely ineffective in opposing the Biden administration's appalling overreach, Fox News is the closest thing to a viable mainstream loyal opposition that we have in this country.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications.  He also appears in the media, including recently as a contributor to OANN, BBC World News, The Glazov Gang, and Fox News.  Peter's website is http://peter.media.  His YouTube channel is here.  For updates on his work, follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

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