Republican Math: Dan Crenshaw Thinks 1% of the Population Watching Fox News Equals Half of America
Why do you have such contempt for half of America?
Labeling and insulting the other side as full of “racism and hate” is a cheap attempt to undermine ideas so that you don’t have to actually confront them. It is an intellectually void strategy. https://t.co/3Lubg4dEH4
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 15, 2019
Wednesday night, Rep. Dan Crenshaw decided to publicly show his displeasure with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to participate in a town hall on Fox News. And also his displeasure with math:
First of all, Warren is talking about Fox News, not voters at large. Half the population does not work for the network.
Nowhere near half the population watches the network either. Fox News in 2018 averaged about 1.4 million viewers a day and 2.4 million in primetime. The population of the United States is just over 327 million. Which means at its evening peak, less than one percent of the population watches Fox News. During the day it is less than one half of one percent.
Some other numbers for Crenshaw, who seems confused: Donald Trump, for whom Fox is basically a propaganda outfit masquerading as a news channel, received 63 million votes in the last election, which translates to about 25 percent of all adults.
The median age of Fox News viewers is 65. The audience for Fox News is 94 percent white, which is about 20 points higher than the nation’s overall population.
Only about 35 percent of Americans even identify as conservative, which is notably less than half of America.
In short, even if we make the safe assumption that only a tiny percentage of right-wingers even watch Fox News, still nowhere near “half the country” likely agrees with the conservative political message the network is blasting out every single day.
Crenshaw’s claim is the real “fake news.”
As for labeling Fox News as being full of “racism and hate,” well, yes. If Crenshaw would like to explain how Tucker Carlson saying that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier” or Laura Ingraham saying that “demographic changes” means “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” are not direct, racist shots at an America that is becoming less white and more diverse, he’s welcome to try.
But since white supremacists keep publicly stating that Carlson is their favorite Fox hosts, and Carlson leads off the primetime lineup when Fox attracts the most viewers, Crenshaw is likely going to have a hard time convincing others that “racism and hate” are not key cornerstones of the network’s ideology, or explain why these are ideas worthy of defense and not ridicule.
He’s welcome to try, though.
