Fox News Benefiting Most From Trump-Inspired Bump In Prime-Time News Ratings

Who said traditional media is dead?

According to the Economist, President Donald Trump's classification of U.S. media companies as being the "enemy" of the American people has resulted in more people tuning in to these networks.

For example, New York Times Co NYT, a media empire Trump blasts as "failing" now boasts more than three million subscribers, 276,000 of whom joined in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone. Moreover, traffic to the media platform is nearly one third higher than it was a year ago.

Related Link: Has Trump's Negativity On The Media Impacted Those Stocks?

“In the evening you put the non-Trump pages to bed so you can focus on the late-breaking Trump news,” The Economist quoted Mark Thompson, the company's CEO as explaining the recent success.

Meanwhile, New York Times' stock has soared more than 40 percent since the 2016 presidential election and even outperformed shares of some of Wall Street's most powerful banks.

Fox News

Twenty-First Century Fox Inc FOXA's news network is perceived by many to be the most "pro-Trump" network and evidence suggests it is the favorite of the president himself.

This might explain why the news channel is seeing outperformance relative to those that are perceived to be hostile to the president's administration.

According to Statista, Fox News boosted the average daily prime-time viewers in the first six weeks of 2017 to more than 3.0 million from just shy of 2.5 million a year ago.

Statista further added that MSNBC's viewership grew to just shy of 1.5 million in the first six weeks of 2017 from below 1.0 million a year ago, while CNN's viewership rose to just over 1.0 million from around 1.0 million over the same time period.

Image Credit: "Gregg Jarrett on set at Fox News" By Thegreggjarrett (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons