Fox News Channel Tops Donald Trump Phoenix Rally Ratings
Fox News Channel dominated cable news coverage of President Donald Trump’s rally in Arizona last night in total viewers and in the news demo, clocking 4.4 million and 1.1 million, respectively, from 10-11:30PM ET.
MSNBC, which did not cover the rally in its entirety, logged 2.41M viewers, 585K in the demo, during the same time period. CNN, which did cover the rally in its entirety despite Trump’s false statements to the contrary, averaged a slightly smaller 2M viewers overall, but edged out MSNBC in the demo, with 660K.
In his Insides Of My Head speech, the President of the United States told supporters the media hate the country and are to blame for neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He dog whistled to rally-goers that the media is “trying to take away our history and our heritage,” in re coverage of efforts to remove Confederate statues.
He promised to shut down the government if it does not build his border wall, making no mention of Mexico paying for it.
He defensively re-read his various “perfect” statements in the wake of the Charlottesville rally at which a white supremacist is charged with killing one counter-protester, but he edited out the bits about there being blame on both sides for the violence, which caused even some of his fellow Republicans to lambaste him. He falsely said the TV cameras in the hall would not show the size of the crowd, which they did, and that they were turning off the cameras when he blasted them, which they did not.
He blasted Arizona’s Republican senators, though not by name, who were not in attendance at the Phoenix rally; also not attending were the state’s GOP governor and Phoenix’s Democratic mayor.
Trump also suggested to rally goers that he will pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio – who is convicted for ignoring court orders to knock off racial profiling – apologizing for not being able to actually do it at the rally because his wranglers made him promise he would not.
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