Between events in Iowa, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump traveled hundreds of miles to a hotel ballroom, where he told a large audience Friday morning he “did the right thing” skipping Thursday’s Republican presidential debate.
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So was the Trump-less Fox News debate a ratings disaster or a ratings win for Fox? CNN and MSNBC, both of which carried Trump’s event, combined for less than half that total.
In the lead-up to the debate, Trump blasted Fox News and claimed that a forum without the billionaire businessman would garner “no ratings”.
Only 8.4 percent of American homes with TV sets watched last night’s GOP debate at the Iowa Events Center, according to early data from Nielsen.
Specifically for Fox News, it’s a ways off from the debate it aired in August, the first of this election, which broke records with its 24 million viewers. With one of his first answers Ted Cruz made a joke about Trump saying, “I’m a maniac, and everyone on this stage is stupid, fat and ugly and Ben you’re a awful surgeon”.
Further, if Fox was selling ads with a promise of anything bigger than 12 million, which I imagine it was, it will probably have to provide advertising time free of charge to make up the difference. We can’t run a controlled experiment with two debates, one including Trump and one not.
And I said that’s okay, we went out and raised six million dollars which is fantastic, so it worked out.
Fox News refused to remove her as debate moderator, insisting that she was not biased. In a statement Thursday night, Fox News said that its chairman, Roger Ailes, “had three brief conversations” with Trump on Thursday “about possibly appearing at the debate”. “Now that we’ve gotten the the Donald Trump portion out of the way”.
Donald Trump tried something different with the most recent Republican presidential debate.
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In Iowa, polls suggest Trump is locked in a tight race with Cruz, a favorite of the conservatives and evangelical Christians who hold significant sway in the state’s Republican caucuses. “Everybody knows that. Do you really think she can be fair at a debate?”
