How do viewer demographics differ between Fox News and CNBC and how might that affect measured IQ?

1. Audiences: size and composition — Fox huge, CNBC niche

Nielsen-based coverage and trade reporting show Fox News as routinely the biggest cable-news audience in 2025: quarterly and monthly tallies put Fox’s weekday-prime averages in the multi‑million range (Fox averaged 2.483 million primetime and 243,000 A25‑54 in Q3 2025 in one report; other coverage cites Fox averaging 3.281 million weekday prime in October) while CNBC’s best-performing programs (business shows such as Squawk on the Street) register in the hundreds of thousands, marking CNBC as a far smaller, more specialized network ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Election-night and off‑year spikes can temporarily reorder ranks among cable networks, but the longer-term pattern across the cited pieces is Fox’s much larger reach versus CNBC’s business-focused audience ^{[4] [5]}.

2. Demographics reported in trade polling: age, education, politics

Polling and audience analyses cited in the corpus indicate cable networks differ on age, employment, education and partisan lean: for example, a Public Opinion Strategies brief describes Fox viewers as older and more likely to approve of conservative positions compared with MSNBC’s audience, while MSNBC/CNN skew younger or more professionally employed in some measures ^[6]. Nielsen and Adweek-style ratings pieces add that ad‑valued demo measures (Adults 25–54) vary widely: Fox routinely leads in total viewers and often in the 25–54 demo, though networks like CNN or MSNBC may win the demo in certain windows ^{[7] [1] [4]}.

3. Why viewer differences matter for any claim about IQ

Measured IQ differences between audiences would hinge on sample selection, test administration and confounds — none of which are documented in the ratings and demographic reporting here. Ratings data tell who watches (estimates by age and demo), not cognitive test scores; the sources show demographic and political sorting that could correlate with many social indicators, but they do not measure IQ directly ^{[1] [7] [6]}. Therefore, any headline that assigns a mean IQ to a network’s viewers requires evidence outside these ratings and polling synopses, which the available materials do not provide (available sources do not mention a validated IQ study linking Fox News or CNBC viewership to measured IQ).

4. The viral “Fox IQ = 80” claim — provenance and limits

The claim that Fox viewers have an average IQ of 80 appears in older web posts and reader‑supported summaries cited here, but those items do not present peer‑reviewed methodology or verifiable sampling and are presented as a sensational finding; trade ratings and polling articles in the provided corpus do not corroborate that number and do not report equivalent IQ testing for any network’s audience ^{[8] [9] [1]}. In short: the sensational number is in the available files but lacks the methodological support present in the Nielsen/ad‑trade audience reporting, and the ratings sources themselves do not assert such IQ differences ^{[8] [1]}.

5. Mechanisms that could bias any measured cognitive difference

If a study attempted to measure “IQ by network,” several plausible confounders would influence outcomes: self‑selection (people choose networks that fit ideology and interests), age distributions (older cohorts score differently on some cognitive tests), education and occupation differences reported by polling firms, and the fact that CNBC’s audience skews toward finance/business professionals while Fox’s audience is larger and older — all factors that could correlate with test performance independent of media effects ^{[6] [3]}. The provided sources document the demographic sorting but do not quantify how these variables would shift cognitive testing results (p1_s1; ^[3]; available sources do not mention empirical adjustments for these confounders).

6. What the sources support — and what they don’t

Supported: Fox News generally posts far higher total‑viewer numbers than CNBC and often dominates prime‑time averages in 2025; CNBC’s audience is smaller and centered on business programming ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Not supported: any authoritative, peer‑reviewed measure of viewers’ IQ by network; the “IQ 80” assertion appears only in less rigorous items without verifiable methodology in the supplied documents (p2_s3; ^[9]; available sources do not mention a validated IQ comparison study).

Conclusion: The data at hand can credibly describe who watches each network (size, age brackets, demo performance and political lean), but they do not justify assigning mean IQ scores to those audiences. Any claim that one channel’s viewers are “smarter” or “less intelligent” requires direct, methodologically sound testing and careful adjustment for age, education, occupation and self‑selection — none of which is present in the ratings and trade reporting provided ^{[7] [1] [8]}.