From Robert Conquests Three Laws of Politics (sometimes also called O’Sullivan’s Law):
2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
I, along with a lot of other people, have been watching Fox New moving from being that network that came into being by serving the audience that the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) and the existing cable news networks disdained – conservatives – to being what I’d now call “Fox News Lite”. It’s hard edge has softened and it seems that it’s rightward stances are moving, faster and faster, to the middle and sometimes, left of center. Lately, I’ve been wondering how much longer it would keep its value add for conservative – a network that doesn’t necessarily pander to us but certainly didn’t insult us outright. It hasn’t gotten to the latter yet but as it continues its slide from the Right, is it just a matter of time? This snippet is from a post over at American Thinker that brings up how Fox is sinking in the ratings – it seems that a good chunk of audience is saying BUH-BYE:
Fox News did come in second to MSNBC and CNN depending on the audience metric, so the ratings picture could have been worse – except when you consider that one year ago, and for the fifteen years before that, Fox News almost always won the ratings in both total viewers and the preferred demographic by wide margins, sometimes with higher numbers than both CNN and MSNBC combined.
So it is clear that the lineup it has right now ain’t doing the job. “Special Report” is fine (although the round table has drifted even as I like that they are rotating different people through (but again, that “edge” thing). Frankly, I thought O’Reilly had become too much of a self-important blowhard for me to spend my time with and I did like “The Five” and have missed it at 5pm – “The Specialists” did nothing for me as background sound at the end of the day while either cooking dinner or playing with the Grandson at the end of the work day. I like Tucker Carlson’s interviews but I’m not going to watch ANY channel ad nauseum during the evening hours (so I DVR him at play it either at 5pm or during the weekend). It’s just either gone “blah” or inconvenient – we’re not watching as much of it as we used to so we’re part of that slump in ratings.
Will this help? I dunno, overall:
Fox’s immediate remedy is to shuffle its schedule starting around Labor Day when it is expected that the under-performing program The Five will return to its 5 P.M. E.T. time period, freeing up 9 P.M. for Hannity and 10 P.M. for, presumably, a new show starring Laura Ingraham. However, with the growing influence on Fox News of the liberal Murdoch Boys, and their equally left-leaning wives, it is unclear how long the new execs at 21st Century Fox will tolerate Hannity – and Tucker Carlson – in prime time. If President Trump’s popularity continues to decline and if the Deep State’s moves to impeach the president succeed in gaining momentum, all bets are off.
I don’t know. Glad to see “The Five” going back to 5pm. Not a big Hannity fan but he’s on mostly when I’m watching History, Discovery, et al “reality” programs about more normal lives and vocations (yes, I know they are “staged” as well – but for an example, I have been enjoying the latest series of “Battle Bots” for the engineering that goes into them). If they were to take off Tucker, it would be one more reason not to watch.
Once again, will there be a void in the “News marketplace” for a person such as myself? And will it be sufficiently wide and deep such that some other entrepreneur with access to (a lot) cash might go “Time to eat their lunch” with a new startup to the same audience that finds itself “underserved” once again?
