Ratings

America Rejects Sarah Palin: Book/TV Flop

Posted by on December 9, 2010 at 9:20 pm. 18 Comments :

Sara PalinAmerican may be tiring of Sarah Palin’s whiny brand of self-glorification. Since she ungraciously rebuffed her fellow Alaskans by quitting half way through her term as governor, Palin has been on a non-stop promotional campaign for herself. But even with all of that effort, she is losing ground amongst discerning consumers.

The ratings for the fourth episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska were the worst yet. Just 2.8 million viewers tuned in. The second episode of SPA saw a 40% drop from the debut. The third didn’t fare quite so badly but was still 35% below the debut. But last Sunday’s airing approached a 50% fall off in a continuing downward spiral. Her own web site vainly tried to focus on the four week average, which means nothing when the the program is still 800,000 viewers shy of that.

As for Palin’s new book, America By Heart, the returns are less than thrilling. The Washington Post reports that sales are “lackluster” and that the publisher “hasn’t ordered a second printing – a sign that sales haven’t been overly brisk.” And it should surprise no one that the quitter’s work ethic has sagged. She spent six weeks on the road and visited 33 states on behalf of her first book. But she only spent ten days in 16 states peddling America By [My] Heart[‘s Not Really In it].

If only she could do the whole book tour on Twitter. I’m sure she would give 110%.

Glenn Beck’s Ratings Sink into Irrelevancy

Posted by on December 2, 2010 at 5:37 pm. 26 Comments :

If there is one thing for which Glenn Beck deserves some measure of credit, it is his ability to promote himself and inflate his influence on the media, and in society, outside of all proportion to reality. The way he is portrayed in the press would give a neutral observer the impression that he is the most beloved public figure in the country with a growing following that dwarfs his contemporaries.

Of course the truth is that Beck is hated as much as he is loved. And in most polls the highest percentage of respondents are those that have no opinion or haven’t even heard of him.

The most recent ratings for his Fox News program bear out these statistics. Even though Beck gets far more attention than his Fox colleagues, his program is not a top performer and it is not growing. In fact, it is the network’s biggest loser.


In the past year Beck has dropped from 2.67 million total viewers to 2.30 million, down 14%. In the key 25-54 year old advertising demographic it’s even worse. He sank from 678,000 to 434,000, a drop of 36%. Keep in mind that the mid-term elections this year ought to have made his program more pertinent and compelling to his audience rather than less, yet he still underperformed last year’s numbers by a huge margin.

Beck’s deteriorating numbers came on the heels of his vaunted “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, DC. Apparently that did nothing to restore his ranking. And two months later Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rubbed salt in his wounds by hosting an even bigger rally. It is also notable that in the same time frame both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow improved their ratings.

During the past year Beck trotted out some unusual news that some cynics may regard as attempts to boost viewership. On one program he announced that he might be going blind. A few weeks later he disclosed that he was being treated for some sort of nerve ailment that resulted in a loss of feeling in his hands and feet (the Stigmata?). He has said nothing about these traumatic incidents since.

The scope of Beck’s ratings failure is not trivial. his decline far exceeds those of his Fox comrades. He routinely places fourth in the Fox lineup behind O’Reilly, Baier, and Hannity. That is pretty low for someone who is being hailed as the network’s star attraction. His ratings are a full 40% below Bill O’Reilly, who doesn’t get nearly as much press as Beck, at least since Beck came aboard. That’s gotta buzz Billo’s beak.

Along with Beck’s dismal ratings picture, he is also a money drain on Fox News. Over 140 American advertisers have pulled their ads from Beck’s show. In the UK Beck has been airing for months with no advertising at all.

You have to wonder why Fox News keeps Beck around when he is neither a source of ratings or revenue. And increasingly he is the network’s greatest source of embarrassment. His ravings are becoming ever more distant from reality (see Glenn Beck Unhinged for copious documentation). The range of his dementia begins with the eminently mockable frightfest he hosted surrounding his assertion that the government is plotting to induce mass starvation via the Food Safety Act. But just when he seems like the rodeo clown he calls himself, he veers into the repulsive bigotry and overt anti-Semitism of his disgraceful and lie-riddled series on George Soros. It would be naive to dismiss him as the joke he often appears to be when he is also capable of incendiary hate speech that has already incited real world violence.

There are only two plausible excuses for keeping someone like Beck on the air:

1) Beck represents the views of the people who employ him and their determination to advance those views supersedes their obligation to produce popular or profitable programming. That would fit the profiles of both Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Ailes is unambiguously partisan and has crammed the Fox lineup with staunch conservative activists in the role of reporters and hosts. At least four potential candidates for the GOP nomination for president are currently on the Fox News payroll. Murdoch has demonstrated his preference for ideology over profit by deficit financing many of his notoriously biased news operations for many years. And the disclosure of his million dollar donations (via News Corp) to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Governor’s Association remove all doubt as to his activist intentions.

2) Beck’s bosses are afraid to terminate him due to the rabid idolatry of his fan base. Even though Beck’s audience is relatively small and shrinking, they are an unstable lot and they would make a fierce roar of anguish were Fox to cut Beck loose. Whether that would manifest violently with threats to the network or its principles is unknown, but not implausible. They would certainly create a media maelstrom. The cultish worship of Beck approaches Messianic proportions. He even speculates on air that he is the target of death threats and that evil, clandestine forces are gathering to silence (crucify?) him. Just imagine how he would spin his cancellation as persecution, and all of his disciples would believe it.

If the suits at Fox News had any integrity they would cancel Beck tomorrow. That’s how television networks work. You bring in either money or viewers or you get the axe. It’s not censorship. It’s called a free market, and I thought right-wingers were supposed to support that. News Corp and Fox executives have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to return profit on their investments, but they are shirking that duty for either ideological of cowardly reasons.

Perhaps it is the shareholders who should revolt and demand that action be taken to restore fiscal responsibility. Either Beck goes or the brass that are too incompetent to do what’s right and necessary do. I’m holding my breath starting . . . . . . . . Now.

America Hates The Media – Thank You Fox News

Posted by on August 14, 2010 at 12:39 pm. 5 Comments :

A new survey by the Gallup organization reveals that Americans have all but given up on old media services like newspapers and television. Only about 25% of respondents say that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either. This puts the legacy media on a par with perennially hated institutions like banks, HMOs and congress.

It isn’t difficult to surmise the reason for this deep distrust. While the media has long been held in low esteem, there was a noticeable decline that began in the mid-1990s. Since that time confidence has dropped about 30%. And just as a point of interest, Fox News launched in 1996.

There isn’t really anything coincidental about it. Fox News has always had as its purpose the discrediting of news as an institution. I made the case for this last year in Fox News Confidential: The Truth Behind Its Secret Mission:

The real mission of Fox News is [cue trumpets] to so thoroughly tarnish the practice of journalism that majorities of the public would recoil in disgust at all of it. Murdoch and Ailes knew that the introduction of a single cable network would have a difficult time enshrouding the whole of the mediasphere in their veil of lies. So rather than try to change people’s minds, they would endeavor to poison the relationship that people have with the press.

Mission accomplished. By trivializing journalism with tabloid-style sensationalism, and diluting its authority with speculation and hyperbolic opinion, Fox has succeeded in producing large majorities of the American public who are now repulsed by the “mainstream” media that barges into their homes every day. The lies Fox News spews are secondary to the campaign of defamation that they launched against the media as a whole. As a result, their fictional accounts of current events are more enduring because people are paying less attention overall.

The saddest part of this scenario is that the non-Fox media have essentially cooperated with Fox’s disparagement of them. Rather than defend themselves and the integrity of their profession, they went along and allowed Fox to create the negative impressions that are now dominant in society. Even worse, they actually helped to reinforce those impressions.

The Washington Post apologized for not covering more of the fakery of Andrew Breitbart. CNN bent over backwards to endorse the wacko wing of the right by hiring RedState’s Erick Erickson. MSNBC continues to host disreputable characters like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan. And everybody persists in covering non-entities like Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. With respect to the latter, Sarah Palin just came in fourth (pdf) amongst Republicans in a preference poll for 2012. And the Tea Party registered a measly (pdf) 30% favorable rating with an even smaller percentage (25%) saying they would vote for a candidate with a Tea Party affiliation. Yet these two subjects get wall-to-wall coverage across the media spectrum.

Perhaps if newspaper and television reporters would cover issues that actually address the interests of their audience they would not be so universally reviled. If they could manage to resist the melodramatic minutiae that Fox News has embraced they could recover some of their lost respect. And above all they need to put objectivity and honesty at the top of their agenda, not ratings and revenue.

In other words, if they deliver a product that is informative and useful, and contributes to people’s lives, profits and popularity will follow. If they continue to pursue the Fox model they will only succeed in further damaging their reputation and their prospects for the future. To say nothing about the damage they are doing to a country whose democracy relies on a well-informed population.

Fox News: Last In Online Ratings

Posted by on August 8, 2010 at 12:43 pm. 16 Comments :

Pray for Fox NewsFor much of the last decade Fox News has dominated the Nielsen ratings for cable news networks. They spend a great deal of their time on air bragging about it too. In reality they haven’t got that much to boast about. Their audience is relatively larger because they corral conservative viewers on one network while all the other networks divide the broader, more mainstream audience into smaller shares. And even with high numbers for cable news, it needs to be noted that cable news is a far smaller market than that for broadcast news. The lowest rated national broadcast news program (CBS) still gets higher ratings than the highest rated cable news program (O’Reilly).

So despite their Narcissistic self-glorification, Fox News doesn’t have nearly the influence they like to pretend to have. And nowhere is that more apparent than on the Internet. MediaWeek reports that Fox News’ presence online is dead last in their sector, landing far behind CNN, MSNBC, and even Yahoo News.

“Foxnews.com averages around 12 million or 13 million monthly unique users, according to Nielsen Online, rarely approaching the 35 million to 40 million uniques that leaders Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN regularly deliver in aggregate.”

The article offers speculation as to the reasons for Fox’s failure ranging from presentation quality to age demographics to the inability to translate the Fox flavor from TV to Cyberspace. There is some truth in all of that. Particularly the difficulty in recreating an online version of Fox’s trademark shoutcasting model, with blustery partisans and rhetorical melodrama. But whatever the reasons, Fox faces some troubling prospects for the future.

Being the number one cable news network may not be such a prize in the years ahead. News consumers, along with everyone else, are moving online for more and more of their information, interaction, and commerce. The next generation may have a very limited relationship with cable news, other than for entertainment and affirmation of positions already held. The preferred destination for learning about your world and your community is increasingly the Internet. This trend is even more evident in younger populations who will shape the future market for news delivery.

What will that leave Fox News when cable news is an afterthought and Fox is last in Internet news? It may be too soon to tell. The Internet marketplace is still fairly malleable and Fox has plenty of money to throw at it. Rupert Murdoch seems concerned about the digital future and has been touting the iPad as a game-changing device, though his focus in that area has been on his crumbling newspaper empire.

Perhaps the most profound observations in this regard are related to News Corp’s history with new media. It isn’t pretty. They had an early failure with the Delphi Internet service. They bombed with their acquisition of MySpace which nosedived promptly after the deal was signed. Their FoxNation site is an embarrassingly contrived pandering to the most repugnant elements of their right-wing base. They have taken a strikingly short-sighted position against Google and other news aggregators (despite being an aggregator themselves). And they are rolling out a doomed policy of locking up their content behind pay walls which will only serve to reduce their customer base further.

If the past is any indicator, Fox News is headed for more misery online, though there is this one bit of consolation: They will always have their most devoted disciples. Their rank for loyalty amongst visitors is the one bright spot for them in the ratings numbers. However, it also exposes their weakness as a niche enterprise that is operating more as a cult than a news outlet. With the past a trail of ruin, and no indication that the future is being attended to, Fox News is headed into a well deserved irrelevancy.

Why Fox News Is Racist

Posted by on July 26, 2010 at 8:53 pm. 9 Comments :

For the past few weeks Fox News has been ratcheting up the racial content of their tabloid fare. Megyn Kelly’s obsession with a trumped up story about the New Black Panther Party and their dozen or so members is a perfect example of the race-baiting that Fox passes off as journalism. They follow that up with the promotion of an Andrew Breitbart video that was blatantly edited to tar USDA employee Shirley Sherrod as a racist even though the opposite was evident when the video was viewed in its entirety.

Glenn Beck Deploring HonorBut these recent events are not aberrations. They are representative of an agenda that cannot be anything but deliberate. Recall Fox’s use of offensive rhetoric with reference to President Obama and his family like “terrorist fist jab” and “Obama’s baby mama.” Then there was the time that Bill O’Reilly tried to explain his reluctance to be critical of the First Lady by saying that he didn’t “want to go on a lynching party.” Or the time he attempted to praise patrons of Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem by noting that they didn’t shout for their “mother-fucking iced teas.” And who could forget Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist with a deep-seated hatred for white people? Beck is escalating his racial insensitivity by holding his self-glorifying rally in DC on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech next month.

Some people might wonder why Fox News would risk alienating a potentially significant portion of their audience. Well, we have the answer now. According to Brian Stelter of the New York Times, the African-American segment of viewers of Fox News in primetime this season is only 1.38%. That compares to 19.3% for MSNBC, and 20.7% for CNN, numbers that are much closer to the 14% of African-Americans in the population at large. These numbers also suggest that the black audience that might have been watching Fox have split evenly between MSNBC and CNN causing those networks to be over-weighted by about 6% each.

It is apparent that Fox News has little to lose by offending a segment of the television universe that doesn’t watch their programs anyway. Combine that with Fox’s political incentive to suppress Democratic votes and the strategy of inflaming racial animus doesn’t seem so bad in their warped perspective.

At the very least this explains why Fox persists in airing obviously offensive stories and why they think they can get away with it without adverse consequences. They have nothing to lose in financial terms, and much to gain by pandering to a prejudice demographic. It may be reprehensible to decent folks, but to Fox it’s just good business, and more importantly, good politics.

Fox News Ratings Plummet In May

Posted by on June 4, 2010 at 7:54 am. 12 Comments :

The latest ratings report for cable news networks reveals a sharp decline for America’s #1 provider of right-wing propaganda. Fox News is leaking more than the BP oil rig in the gulf. According to TV By the Numbers:

In May, all of Fox News’ primetime programs posted their worst 25-54 demo deliveries in a year or more. May represents The O’Reilly Factor’s worst performance since January 2009, Hannity’s lowest delivery to date since taking over the time period in January 2009 and On the Record’s lowest since May 2009. Fox Report with Shep Smith had its lowest demo delivery since December 2008.

Even worse for Fox, their ratings have dropped about 20-35% in almost every hour of the day from their numbers at the beginning of the year. Fox’s stars were all particularly hurt in the key advertising demographic of 25-54 year olds. Neil Cavuto was down 29%, Bill O’Reilly dropped 30%, and Sean Hannity sunk 35%. Glenn Beck was not immune either. Despite his claim on his program last week that his numbers had risen, the truth is that he suffered a 23% drop in the demo and 26% in total viewers.

To be sure, the cable news market was fairly soft last month. The only network that posted increases was CNN, and that was likely due to the favorable comparisons over their previous dismal performance. This ratings report is nothing to brag about for any of the big players. But Fox hit some milestone lows that need to be put in perspective considering their proclivity for lying about their market position. Beck has already made ludicrous claims about his numbers, and O’Reilly spends half his time boasting about himself.

While Fox remains in the top spot for cable news, we need to remember two things: 1) Cable news is a small market that in total draws about half the audience of the broadcast news providers. And 2) Being #1 is not a validation of quality. Just ask anyone who’s ever eaten at McDonalds.

The Opportunity At CNN: Replace Campbell Brown With The Daily Show

Posted by on May 19, 2010 at 6:15 pm. 6 Comments :

CNN Daily ShowNow that Campbell Brown has announced that she will be signing off of her CNN show, CNN has an opportunity to advance the state of journalism. They are the network that claims to be the champions of straight news and they dismiss the partisanship that is so deeply ingrained in Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC. So if they are serious, they need to take a long, hard look at themselves and begin to construct the sort of ethical news enterprise to which they claim to aspire.

The first thing they need to recognize is that they presently have no exclusive claim to being non-partisan. The only difference between them and their competition is that their hosts are not overtly partisan. But the substance of many of their programs is just mashed together panels of left and right pundits who argue with one another. That’s not non-partisan, it’s multi-partisan. More importantly, it’s not journalism.

If they are serious, CNN needs to fill this timeslot with a program that doesn’t seek to attain some sort of fabled balance. Balance is a phony metric. Journalism is not served when you balance reporting about say, the dangers of cigarettes, with a segment about how smoking cures cancer. The standard should not be balance, it should be truth.

One of the best examples of truth-telling in the media today is The Daily Show. Sure it’s funny and the correspondents are clowns (which is something they have in common with Fox News correspondents), but there is a determined effort to cast aside bullshit and back up their humor with facts. The technique of juxtaposing video of a politician making contradictory statements was a Daily Show innovation that has been picked up by some “real” news programs.

Am I seriously proposing that The Daily Show replace Campbell Brown? Let’s just say that I’m only half joking. It’s important to note that The Daily Show is not a news information show, in that it is not a collection of reports about what happened during the day. There is a presumption that their viewers already know what’s going on. It is also not political satire. It is media satire. Almost every segment is about how the media covers stories rather than the content of the stories themselves.

I think that a daily program that addresses the way news is presented would be a welcome addition to CNN’s schedule. By eight o’clock in the evening there has been plenty of time to observe and critique the reporting that occurred during the day. If they need additional time they could do the previous day. This would be more than a dry exercise in fact-checking. While taking a more sober tone than Jon Stewart, it could still be a raucous affair that would be both fun and enlightening. They could use dynamic and fast-paced Entertainment Tonight style graphics and charming, but well informed, hosts. They could even bring in special correspondents on occasion (I would recommend Stewart or other actual Daily Show personalities).

This show could provide true competition to the O’Reilly/Olbermann/Grace block that dominates the time period. It could also be a bellwether program that holds the media feet to the fire. They would have to play fair and include CNN’s flubs. Preferably it would be produced independently. But if they executed it right, I think many viewers would find it a refreshing change from the shoutfests on the other cable nets. Then CNN could use it to anchor a slate of truly responsible newscasts.

The only question is: Are the program executives at CNN smart enough to listen to me? Of course, they probably don’t even know I exist. Consequently, look for CNN to add another interminable hour of John King.

UPDATE: Fox News, Nielsen Ratings, And Trust In The Media

Posted by on May 10, 2010 at 1:23 pm. 4 Comments :

Last month I wrote an article detailing some suspicious activities and histories of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, and their relationship to the monopolistic survey group, Nielsen Media Research. The article was titled, Fox News Caught In Massive Nielsen Ratings Fraud. It should be noted that the publish date for the article was April 1, 2010. It is important to recognize the traditional significance of that date when evaluating the content of the article.

The purpose of this update is to respond to ongoing interest in the subject matter. The article has been circulating the Internet via links from prominent media players, including Roger Ebert and Alan Colmes’ LiberalLand. So I thought I would take this opportunity to clarify a couple of points and to offer some analysis of the response.

First of all, despite the “first day of April” publication, the article’s primary factual assertions are true and documented. Fox News did object to early iterations of Nielsen’s then-new People Meter technology. News Corp did have a prior business relationship with the manufacturers of Nielsen’s set-top ratings collection devices. News Corp was connected to corporate espionage and sabotage, which was reported by Wired Magazine. News Corp did make payoffs to certain parties to suppress a scandal involving email hacking and other violations of privacy of public figures, which was reported by the Guardian. And Rupert Murdoch is enmeshed in a tangled web with businesses and government agencies and leaders in communist China, as reported in Esquire.

The foregoing factual basis for my column notwithstanding, the headline and conclusions were squarely in the grand tradition of the day upon which April begins. Nevertheless, many readers approached the whole of the article with a seriousness that was only partly intended. To me this illustrates an inherent distrust of ratings data, as well as an eagerness on the part of the public to accept any plausible allegation of deceit or misconduct on the part of the media. I would have to concur on both points. Indeed, those points were the primary motivation for my writing the article in the first place.

The very real problems with Nielsen data are well-known and ongoing. They employ a methodology that is archaic and unreliable. It’s so bad that their biggest customers repeatedly attempt to fund alternative data providers. The latest effort is the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement. This group was formed last August by 14 big media enterprises including NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney. At the time of the announcement I expressed skepticism that it would yield any positive results. Every other attempt to undermine Nielsen’s supremacy has ended badly for the new venture. The failures were due primarily to infighting amongst the coalition members and their self-serving pursuit of parochial concerns.

The CIMM does not appear to be faring any better than their predecessors. While it may be too soon to write them off, there does not seem to be any substantive progress outside of an initiative to agree on common definitions of research terms. The creation of an industry lexicon is hardly forward progress. And the companies that have some of the best data aggregation technology (i.e. cable operators, TIVO, etc.) have so far declined to participate. The CIMM is months away from producing any tangible results, and when they do you can expect sparks to fly as member companies find fault with what the coalition delivers.

As for Fox News, their recent ratings performance has not supported any conspiracy theory alleging cheating on their behalf. Their most recent quarterly numbers showed a harrowing 20% viewer exodus. Their star attraction, Glenn Beck, lost a third of his audience since January, along with many of his advertisers. But maybe this is just a ruse to calm the suspicions that are swirling around them. If their ratings decline temporarily, everyone will assume that they aren’t tampering with them. Then, when the heat’s off, they goose them right back up on demand. What a devious plot they are contriving. No one wonder no one trusts them.

Fox News Ratings Dive: American IQ Rebounds

Posted by on April 28, 2010 at 12:34 pm. 32 Comments :

Fox News Tea BagThe latest quarterly Nielsen ratings reveal a promising trend in cable news viewership. This has been a challenging time for all media and, while cable has been relatively stable, it has not been immune from a general advertising slump and softening audience.

While all three of the major cable news networks suffered primetime declines, MSNBC held its audience best, losing only 6% in the past quarter. By comparison Fox News dropped three times as much (-19%), and CNN collapsed (-40%).

CNN’s woes are not particularly surprising. They have utterly failed to define themselves in this era of advocacy journalism. Their approach to a middleground, news-centric broadcast is admirable, but poorly implemented. If they were truly interested in focusing on straight news, they would abandon the pretense of balancing every story on the basis of partisanship and instead balance it on the basis of truth. In other words, stop booking liars just to have a counter-argument. If one guest says the moon is a barren, rocky satellite, you do not need an opposing guest to assert that it’s lime Jello. Or if you do host the lime Jello spokesman, at least offer some post-debate analysis that makes it clear that the Jello argument is known to be false.

MSNBC has benefited in an ironic way by not having had a meteoric rise. Their numbers have been depressed by poor cable coverage and placement on premium tiers. As a result, they have had less distance to fall. Their performance appears to be better on a relative basis simply by maintaining a steady course.

More surprising is the precipitous drop at Fox News. They have been enjoying a surge in the past few years, even when their competition was hurting. For them to get hit so hard this quarter is a significant development. Fox has relied upon a fierce sense of loyalty on the part of their viewers to prop up their ratings. I have described it as something of cult (the Cult of Foxonality) wherein Fox viewers are actually more devoted to the network than to any political party of philosophy. The ratings this quarter suggest that the hold that Fox has had on its audience is weakening.

As evidence of Fox’s diminishing influence, take a look at their biggest star, Glenn Beck. He has lost fully one third of his audience since the beginning of the year. Apparently people are tiring of his redundant, hyperbolic screeds pronouncing that half of the Obama administration are communists and the other half are Satanists. He may also have lost viewers when he called the President a racist and when he insulted Christians by warning them to flee their church if it practiced social justice.

Beck has other problems as well. He has undoubtedly been hurt by an advertiser boycott that has seen a couple of hundred advertisers swear off his program. In the UK he is airing with no advertisers at all. In this environment, how long can Fox News justify keeping him on the schedule? They waved off the ad boycott by bragging about his ratings. With neither ads nor viewers, the only thing they have left is an unpopular clown act that is descending further into televangelism with every episode.

The dilemma for Fox News is complicated. From the start they have been on a mission to advance the conservative philosophy of their owner, Rupert Murdoch, and his henchman, Roger Ailes. Unfortunately for them, they have failed miserably in that regard. They threw everything they had at the Democrats and still lost control of Congress in 2006, lost the White House in 2008, and lost the health care debate in 2010. Despite their ratings dominance they have not been able to convert it to their electoral advantage. What happens when their ratings dominance is gone?

The battle within the Fox executive suites will be one that pits the accountants against the ideologues. And let’s face it, in the rarefied air of Fox News, the accountants are toast. My money is on Fox News doubling down and expanding their partisan rhetoric. That’s what they’ve done in the past. In the months leading up to and following the Obama victory in 2008, Fox didn’t bother to recognize a national trend. Instead, they fortified their conservative flank by signing new long-term contracts with Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. They axed Hannity’s foil, Alan Colmes. They hired reinforcements like Beck, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, Dana Perino, Judith Miller, and Sarah Palin. They are not the sort of competitors that back down in the face of adversity – or reason.

If Fox does escalate the wingnut war, they are making a poor bet. They already own the franchise on rightist zealots and are unlikely to gain viewers in that demographic. More likely they can expect to see their ratings decline further. Americans are sick of the divisive ravings of partisan shills who have to resort to making things up in order to sway the debate.

The good news is that since the audience for Fox News has declined, the collective IQ of the country has risen. OK, I made that up, but it seems entirely plausible. Fox News viewers have been shown to be notably less informed, or more misinformed, than the viewers of other networks or the public at large. So it stands to reason that the fewer people infected with Fox lies, the more intelligent we are as a nation. And going forward that can only be a boon to the development of public policy and to democracy itself.

Sarah Palin’s Real American Fluff Gets Soft Reception

Posted by on April 2, 2010 at 5:31 pm. 10 Comments :


See the entire Malice in Wonderland

If Fox News thought they had the next big thing locked up when they signed Sarah Palin, they may be having second thoughts today.

The broadcast of Sarah Palin’s Real American Fluff Pieces, a collection of old clips that were supposed to be inspirational, probably did not inspire much excitement in the Fox News executive suites. The audience, while besting the competition, was not particularly impressive for Fox. In fact, Palin had fewer viewers than Greta Van Susteren’s On the Record, the program she preempted. There were only about 2 million real Americans tuning into Palin’s show (472K adults 25-54). That compares to Van Susteren’s 2.3 million viewers (654K 25-54) last Thursday and 2.1 million (559K 25-54) average for the first quarter of 2010.

From a critical perspective, the reviews are in, and they aren’t lighting up the Fox Towers. Most of the comments employ adjectives like “tame,” “canned,” “stiffness,” “innocuous,” and “disconnected.” If this is her out-of-town tryout, she isn’t going on to Broadway.

It’s fair to assume that Palin is well compensated for her efforts on behalf of Fox News. I haven’t seen any disclosures of her salary but she gets a minimum of $100,000 for speaking engagements, so you can bet she got a gold-plated contract from her pal Rupert Murdoch. Nevertheless, her numbers would have put her in seventh place in the cable news rankings following Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Special Report w/Bret Baier, Van Susteren, and Fox Report w/Shepard Smith. She did manage to beat Neil Cavuto and an O’Reilly rerun.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what Roger Ailes had in mind when he dropped a pile of cash on her. Of course, this is not her only duties at Fox. She also provides commentary to programs like Van Susteren’s and O’Reilly’s. Well, commentary may be too generous a description. It’s more like a litany of platitudes and cliches that she probably wrote on her palm. Even her colleague Chris Wallace dressed her down on the air – to her face – saying, “Well, you’re not a very good analyst.” Palin responded by inviting Ailes to fire her. That notion might have entered his mind this morning when he saw the overnights.

Yesterday’s program got off to a rocky start when one of the featured guests, LL Cool J, revealed that he had never spoken to Fox or Palin and that the interview was a two year old clip that he had not given permission to rebroadcast for this purpose. Fox responded by insulting him and cutting him out of the show. Shortly after, Toby Keith, another featured guest, made the same complaint as LL Cool J. Oddly enough, the white country singer was neither insulted nor edited out, as the black rapper/actor was.

Fox News is the most profitable division of Murdoch’s News Corp. Over the past few years their ratings have grown and they’ve renegotiated richer contracts with cable operators. But business decisions like the Palin signing are not going to add to the company’s future prospects. They are already suffering the embarrassment of having their second highest rated program, Glenn Beck, going to air with advertising for diet pills and gold recyclers because Ford and Wal-Mart don’t want to be associated with him.

Under the circumstances, I’m not sure that Murdoch and Ailes can possibly think that they are getting their money’s worth from Beck or Palin. But that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to carry them. Murdoch has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the New York Post and it has never been profitable for as long as he’s owned it. He purchased the Wall Street Journal for $5 billion and last year wrote off $2 billion of that. He has been deficit financing the Fox Business Network for over two years with still no sign of it going into the black. In short, he’s made of money and doesn’t care how much of it he loses in pursuit of his political agenda.

That ought to come as a great relief to Sarah Palin after this disastrous debut as an anchor.