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Fox Cable News reduces its competitors to Lilliputs, who in this reference to Gulliver’s Travels, have been unable to catch Fox sleeping long enough to tie it down.
Instead, Fox is the winner of my Tingle Up My Leg Award, named for MSNBC’s Chris “Tweety” Matthews. Unfortunately for Tweety, his show commands only about a third of the viewers compared to the competitors on Fox during the same time slots.
Fox Cable TV rules the news, second only to the powerhouse, USA, that mostly shows TV drama repeats and made-for-TV movies.
This week Fox again leads by a large margin its competitors. In primetime (8-11 p.m.), Fox News averaged 551,000 viewers in the target 25-54 year-old demographic, with MSNBC finishing a distant second with 271,000, and CNN third with 248,000. If you want to see this weeks cable news ratings, they are all here, but to save you time, Fox is first for every hour of every day.
Fox Cable News takes a lot of hit from critics of course. “Faux News,” as they like to call it, is as “fair and balanced” as a Las Vegas slot machine. Those of us who study the news know that almost every media outlet has its “slant” (translation= rock solid predisposition). So Fox is propably no more, and surely no less, biased than most any other news source.
But why does Fox run so far ahead of the rest of the pack?
I asked some friends, and would be interested in hearing from our readers here as well, whether they like or dislike the way Fox delivers news. Some disagreed with specific hosts and their personalities but liked that viewers get something different than what comes out of the White House spin room. Others noted that Fox is much better at touching on what people care about, like government spending.
Fox may also out-fox its competitors. For example, much of the rest of the media was deriding the anti-tax “tea party” demonstrations as a gimmick, masterminded by corporate Republicans rather than a true grassroots movement. The protesters themselves were re-labeled by smirking commentators as “teabaggers.” (See Larry Johnson’s story if you are unaware of a meaning of that term.) Keith Olbermann and Rachael Maddow of MSNBC suggested that the protestors were either political plants or nut-jobs. Fox, on the other hand, actually promoted the protests, promising beforehand to give the events full coverage and following through.
Well, I watched some of that on Fox, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass whether the demonstrations were organized by pros or not. I wanted to see lots of pissed-off people who feel ripped off like I do, to hear stories expressing their disdain for the runaway spending that seems to have trouble trickling down to those of us who paid for it. That day, Fox definitely worked for me.
