Greg Gutfeld Just Buried CNN and MS NOW When News Broke About How Big the Gap Is
MSNBC rebranded as MS NOW to escape its toxic image.
The new name did not stop the collapse it was built to hide.
Greg Gutfeld and The Five just put a number on the damage.
Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld Turned a Panel Show into Cable's Biggest Draw
Fox News closed the quarter averaging 2.4 million weekday primetime viewers, enough to beat every broadcast competitor including CBS.
The network pulled 56 percent of the total cable news audience and 57 percent of the primetime audience, numbers no rival news channel came close to touching.
The Five alone pulled in 3.1 million total viewers a night, finishing as the single most-watched cable news program in America for the 20th consecutive quarter.
Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, Emily Compagno, Jessica Tarlov and Harold Ford Jr. did it with 289,000 viewers in the 25 to 54 demographic advertisers pay the most to reach, putting the panel show at number one in that category too.
Jesse Watters Primetime, Gutfeld!, Special Report with Bret Baier, Hannity and The Ingraham Angle rounded out a lineup that left the competition fighting for scraps.
That kind of depth across an entire schedule is not an accident.
It is what happens when a network builds personalities people actually want to watch instead of personalities a network tells people to watch.
MSNBC's New Name Could Not Hide Its Worst Month in Decades
MS NOW, the network formerly known as MSNBC, pulled just 592,000 total viewers for the quarter against Fox's 1.3 million.
Rachel Maddow aired 10 episodes in the quarter while The Five aired 59, and the math shows up in the ratings every single week.
CNN did worse than that: its top-rated show, Newsnight, averaged 686,000 viewers and ranked 24th among every cable news program on the air.
Branding experts had already warned the MS NOW rebrand was a gamble before the numbers came in.
Johns Hopkins professor Michael D. Cohen called the new name "soulless," arguing it served the corporate spinoff with Versant instead of the audience actually watching.
Even a former NBC News executive piled on, joking that the gap between "MS" and "NOW" reads less like a news brand and more like a medical awareness campaign.
The rebrand needed a ratings miracle to work.
It got the opposite: a demo audience of just 45,000 viewers in October, the lowest since 1997, with primetime down 41 percent year over year.
Why Conservative Viewers Keep Choosing Gutfeld Over Scripted Liberal Hosts
MS NOW poured resources into a focus-grouped name change and still could not buy back the audience it lost.
Perino and Gutfeld are not reading from a teleprompter and reciting the same talking points as every other liberal anchor on cable.
They argue, they needle each other, and they call things what they are, and viewers reward it every single quarter.
CNN and MS NOW built their brands on lecturing Trump voters, and the lecture stopped working the moment Trump voters found somewhere else to watch.
The panel format at The Five beat every solo anchor combined because viewers would rather watch five people fight honestly than one person perform outrage on command.
Twenty straight quarters is not a hot streak.
It is a verdict on who legacy media actually serves, and it is not the viewers who left.
Sources:
- Fox News, "'The Five' Leads Cable News for 20th Straight Quarter as Fox News Outdraws CNN and MS NOW Combined," Fox News, September 30, 2026.
- Fox News, "MSNBC's 'Risky' Rebrand to MS NOW Draws Skepticism From Branding Experts," Fox News, 2026.
- The Gateway Pundit, "Fox News Show 'The Five' Continues to Crush All Competition in Cable News Ratings," The Gateway Pundit, October 2026.
