So according to Nikki Haley, America isn’t a racist country, even though she and her parents experienced racism and discrimination. Also, America isn’t a racist country, even if Ann Coulter tells her to “go back to her country”, even though she’s American.
She may be of Indian ancestry, but she seems to have plenty of white fragility.
Honestly, it isn’t really, which I consider a hopeful thing.
Fox News had record profits last year, but it was smoke and mirrors. They made some acquisitions (which are profits only on paper- a classic corporate shenanigan). Most of the real gains came from strong-arming rate increases with cable providers in order to carry their service. Their viewership dropped substantially in that same time frame and continues to drop. Tucker Carlson’s show specifically also apparently loses money and remains on the air only because Murdoch has ordered it so. Murdoch will prop up the entire org if he has to, but the fact is he’s an old man and we just have to wait him out.
Same goes for the Fox News audience. While their viewership dropped substantially last year, it dropped less than CNN and MSNBC. This likely reflects an overall aging out of the cable news audience. Younger and more progressive (or at least not MAGA nut) people are not watching cable TV anymore. So again- Fox is competing for an ever shrinking demo of old angry white people on TV, and they are not succeeding online. Their streaming platform Tubi is not even a blip on any radar.
Fox News is in a lot of trouble medium-term, and I’m sure they know it.
Thanks, the rest of your comment is indeed hopeful, but I’m not pinning any hope on his demise. He has a pair of sons waiting/vying to take over.
I mean… it seems to be? Fox has made it work, at least.
True, but I’d argue that’s probably true across many fields in a capitalist system. There are tons of big corporations who regularly produce smoke and mirrors to keep their stock prices up, and to keep wealth flowing into the pockets of the shareholders and owners… just look at… well, all of the social media landscape.
I just think much of capitalism, especially the current neo-liberal iteration, is just that - smoke and mirrors, built on nothing solid, but just moving bits around on a computer and convincing the public to buy in…
Which is part of the reason that they back the far right, because they know they’ll be the “state” media if they win… or so they think.
Lachlan has already clearly and openly demonstrated his willingness to subsidise a fascist agenda on the network. Tucker Carlson’s show couldn’t survive on its rinky-dink dodgy advertisers alone, so Faux steps in to make up the shortfall.
Ironic if what I’ve heard is true, that it has the largest audience of any cable “news”/chat show.
It might. That’s the racket here. Faux can shake down the cable systems to pay it for the “honour” of carrying the network because it has a huge audience of mouth-breathers who pay their monthly cable bills mainly to watch that channel. Most other news networks can’t do that.
That shakedown money covers the operational costs, with the ad revenue being the gravy. Even semi-reputable advertisers who place spots elsewhere on the network avoid Carlson’s show like the plague, though, so from an accounting viewpoint it’s unprofitable.
However, those aforementioned mouth-breathers would also howl if his show was taken off the air, endangering the shakedown. So the shareholders end up footing the bill for the majority of the fascist TV dinner heir’s massive salary.
The question is, at what point does the viewership of Fox drop to where cable channels decide to drop them the way DirecTV dropped Newsmax?
Fox, and conservatives in general knows that day is coming, maybe a decade from now. Fox’s viewership leans closer to the top of the actuary table than the bottom, which is one reason conservatives were so incensed when DirecTV moved to drop bargain-basement Fox.
They know the day will come when their hate spewing sewer will no longer be economically sustainable.
Some choice quotes:
Fox News primetime viewers amount to less than 1% of the population.
ABC News averages 3 times the viewers of Fox News in prime time.
Interesting numbers.
I wonder if there’s a way to account, in a quantifiable way, for how much the network’s influence is outsized, by which I mean, how much attention they get elsewhere (such as here, let alone Tweeter and such). I also wonder if being as outrageous as possible, or allowable, is largely an effort to get that further, rippling attention.
Good question! I wonder if these numbers take into account things like people who only watch cable shows on clips online (as many younger people do). And of course, plenty of people also hate watch fox (though my exposure is generally either to clips on late night talk show clips that I watch pretty much only on Youtube)…
But yeah, what exactly do ratings tell us about the actual impact of Fox news?
They got over the losses of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly—their only loyalty is to the channel itself
There are a few factors working against the situation changing before 2030
First, there are the cable systems operators. At best they’re bloated regional monopolies, with all the inertia that implies (there’s a reason customer service is notoriously and intractably bad). At worst they’re also controlled by entitled and lazy families who inherited the business, who don’t want to make changes to the money-printing machine, and are all for any news outlet that supports their only real political issue of tax cuts for the wealthy; the dimwitted Dolan family of NY are the textbook examples here. So you have a hidebound, unimaginative, change-averse bunch here, the kind of executives and boards that fought tooth-and-nail in the late 1990s not to get into the ISP business.
Second, these executives have tunnel vision. They only care about what’s going on in their systems and follow each-other’s leads within the industry as a whole. They don’t care about the viewership of news programmes captured by a broadcast antenna. What they look at in the case of Faux is market share of viewership 24-hour news networks, and what they see is that Faux continually dominates as the top channel in the category, with CNN and MSNBC each having roughly half Faux’s amount and then a bunch of easily-booted also-rans including OnAN and NewsTrash.
Third, there are the viewers. Millions of elderly right-wingers often buy their basic cable package primarily to watch Faux as an alternative to the “librul” broadcast networks. In contrast, “I bought my cable package to watch CNN [or MSNBC]” is something only a tiny number of people would ever say.
As others here noted, it’s a demographic issue, but a lot more Americans over age 60 have to die off and a new generation of cable system owners have to inherit before 24-hour cable news becomes a dead business.
The only thing that ultimately counts with Faux is which hosts Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are loyal to (although obviously “loyalty” isn’t the best term there). The viewers are what they always are: their marks and suckers.
This can’t possibly be true. I have it under good authority from Nikki Haley (the one who grew up in a town that was segregated by rail road tracks) that America isn’t a racist country. 
Same as it ever was!
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