Ratings

Bill O’Reilly’s Bald-Faced Lies About His Ratings

Posted by on October 27, 2009 at 8:52 am. 15 Comments :

On his program Monday, Bill O’Reilly had another episode of Ratings Derangement Syndrome. I first reported this malady exactly one year ago when O’Reilly became unhinged at what he believed was a conspiracy by Nielsen to destroy him:

“The bottom line on this is there may be some big-time cheating going on in the ratings system, and we hope the Feds will investigate. Any fraud in the television rating system affects all Americans.”

Of course the Feds have no oversight authority to investigate private polling firms. And O’Reilly had no evidence of wrongdoing anyway. It’s also interesting to note that O’Reilly has no problems with Nielsen’s data now that they are reporting a rosier picture of his program’s performance. But he still has his knickers in a twist over any media critic who dares to question his primacy. This most recent outburst began with a declaration dripping in hyperbole and delusions of grandeur.

“Fox News is now the most powerful news organization in the United States of America, and that means in the world.”

It is statements like that that require linguists to create new adjectives, because supercilious, delusional, and narcissistic, simply don’t cut it anymore. O’Reilly still doesn’t get that Fox reaches a mere 1% of the American public. The vast majority of news consumers are opting to watch programs other than his. O’Reilly was responding to criticism from Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, who raised O’Reilly’s ire by saying that, “Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap.” O’Reilly ought to be grateful to Klein for being so gentle. The truth is Fox News peddles a huge amount of hateful crap. But instead, O’Reilly’s misguided indignation led him to spew a batch of unmitigated lies:

“Look what’s happened. Fox News thirteen years on the air, OK?. Wipes out every other cable network, OK?. It’s not even close. Now, we’re approaching, the Factor is approaching Katie Couric numbers. We’re real close to Katie Couric numbers. We beat everybody else. Good Morning America. Nightline. I think the Today show is a little bit ahead of us, but it’s close.

First of all, Fox News does not wipe out every other cable network. They lead only amongst cable “news” networks. TBS, ESPN and USA, routinely beat Fox News (it’s not even close), but O’Reilly failed to make that distinction.

Secondly, O’Reilly’s contention that he is approaching Katie Couric numbers is laughable. Primarily because it wouldn’t be that much of a feat. Couric is the worst performing broadcast news program. But to compound his comedic dishonesty, he doesn’t come close to Courics ratings. Couric’s average of approximately 5.5 million is almost twice O’Reilly’s 3 million viewers. and the top rated NBC News brings in about 8.5 million, nearly triple O’Reilly.

Finally, O’Reilly doesn’t beat Good Morning America. Nightline, or the Today show. Setting aside the fact that these shows don’t even compete with O’Reilly, and their time periods have an entirely different potential audience, he still fails to best them. In fact, the Today Show also nearly doubles O’Reilly’s numbers even though it is on in the early morning hours while O’Reilly is on in primetime.. He could have claimed a victory over CBS’s perennial loser, The Early Show, but for some reason didn’t bother.

In the end, this is just another display of O’Reilly’s dishonesty and arrogance. And despite his objections, and his egotistical fantasies, he is only illustrating why knowledgeable observers do not regard Fox as a news network. It is merely a platform for self-serving propaganda, manic paranoia and partisan disinformation.

Fox News Propped Up By Republicans And Southerners

Posted by on August 18, 2009 at 12:35 pm. 6 Comments :

A new poll by Daily Kos/Research 2000 explores some interesting, but not entirely surprising, viewing patterns for the three top cable news networks. The poll’s most revealing results are those that break out party affiliation and regional viewing.

Overall, 25% of respondents watch Fox News at least once a week. That number includes 23% of Democrats and 14% of Independents. The obvious partisan standout is Republicans with 52% watching at least once a week. Similarly, regional viewing is heavily weighted to the south with 39% of southerners tuning in to Fox News. The rest of the nation is far less attracted to the right-wing network who draws significantly fewer viewers from the west (23%), the midwest (21%), and the northeast (13%). Also notable is the dismal performance of Fox amongst young voters (18-29) and minorities, at least 80% of whom report that they never watch Fox News. In fact, more than 50% of all of the groups of viewers (party, region, ethnicity, age) never watch Fox News, except for Republicans (38%).

Republicans and southerners are also the most sharply segmented groups in the survey when queried on viewing of CNN and MSNBC. An examination of the data shows that these two groups almost completely shut out any news source other than Fox News. To be sure, Democrats favor MSNBC and, to a lesser extent CNN, in greater numbers than other demographic breakouts, but the disparity is nowhere near as great as that for Republicans and southerners.

These numbers are essentially repeated when the question turns from viewing habits to perceptions of accuracy. The only significant variance is in the “not sure” column. For those who reported being unsure with regard to accuracy, both CNN and Fox had percentages in the low twenties. MSNBC, however, reported 60% not sure. This number probably reflects the lower distribution of MSNBC on cable outlets nationally.

The bottom line is that Republicans and the south occupy a very different country than the rest of us do. This party and regional divergence could not be more pronounced. It suggests that a case could be made that the Civil War was not a particularly constructive event. The consequence of this discord is that neither the conservative south, nor the more progressive north, west, and east, are being represented very well. Previous studies have shown these same distinctions on policy questions like health care and opinions on whether the President was a natural born U.S. citizen.

This new poll is a useful glimpse into cable news viewing habits, but I would still like to see what a Nielsen survey would show. There is ample evidence that Fox is a predominately regional network whose viewers are clustered in the south. With Nielsen data to confirm this, advertisers might alter the way they allocate their budgets. Also, cable operators might adjust their channel offerings, which could help to resolve the distribution problem that MSNBC has been hampered by.

It is truly a shame that the majority of the country is being held hostage by a minority that is pushing a Dark Ages platform that opposes universal health care, civil rights, tax fairness, and environmental protection. And it compounds the shame that an overtly biased cable news network is artificially elevated in a manner that inflates its clout so that it can further distort the political landscape.

However, one other thing needs to be taken from this survey. The numbers of respondents who say they never watch any of the cable news nets (averaging over 2/3) affirms my long held belief that far too much is made of what these networks do and say. The total viewership in primetime for the whole bunch is less than 2% of the American population. Putting that into perspective should give analysts pause when attributing any significance to what is said on cable news.

Media Consortium Contemplates Competiton To Nielsen

Posted by on August 14, 2009 at 12:58 pm. NO Comments :

The Financial Times is reporting that some of the top media companies are exploring options for creating an alternative to Nielsen Media’s monopolistic control of the television ratings system.

“Media participants in the consortium – including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney – expect it to be operational by September.”

Neilsen’s service has been the subject of criticism for decades. Its methodology is virtually guaranteed to misrepresent the actual TV audience. Out-of-home viewing isn’t included. This is a significant portion of the marketplace that includes offices, dorms, hotels, bars, etc. Their sampling is skewed by being limited just to those respondents who aren’t creeped out by having a device attached to their TV that records everything they watch. They do not account for cultural viewing habits where certain groups of viewers gather together to view programs. That has a disproportional impact on young and low income viewers, as well as sports fans. And the new media marketplace (i.e. digital viewing) is almost completely ignored.

So it is well past time to overhaul this archaic and inaccurate process of measuring TV usage. But don’t get too excited. I have seen at least three of these consortiums come and go. It is a high risk, low probability exercise that is almost doomed to fail before it begins.

Here is how it generally goes. The stakeholders (producers, syndicators, advertisers) come together agreeing that the status quo is untenable and something has to be done. Then they solicit prospective enterprises to fill the gaps that Nielsen is missing. The consortium promises to support the new venture and help them to develop a product that all parties will find useful. The new venture invests millions of dollars and thousands of hours in building their service. At some point they are ready to provide the consortium with sample data. In the instances that I witnessed, the new data was often in conflict with the data from Nielsen, but it was well supported and appeared to differ only because they were more accurate than Nielsen.

This is where the trouble starts. With numbers that differ from Nielsen, some parties will be up while others are down. The parties whose numbers are lower will immediately object to the new service and complain that they are not being represented properly. Then the consortium begins to collapse. As the aggrieved parties back away, the remaining members are faced with greater burdens to support the new venture because the cost is distributed between fewer players. Plus, these higher burdens come as the project is in turmoil, which makes any continued investment even more risky, and thus, less likely.

A peculiarity of the television advertising world is that these folks prefer inaccurate data to accurate data that makes them look bad. Maybe that isn’t really peculiar, just self-serving and dishonest (like that never happens in business). But it bodes ill for any enterprise that seeks to promote themselves by boasting about their accuracy.

As the consortium and the new venture have been wrestling to put together the new service, Nielsen has been busily disparaging the new venture as untested and unreliable. At the same time, they have started to adopt the methods and features of the new venture and slash their own fees to undercut the new competition.

The result is that the new venture eventually loses the necessary support to be sustainable and quietly fades away. Nielsen, after preserving their monopoly, retreats to their previous levels of poor service and unresponsiveness to their clients. And with the threat of competition removed, they inevitably increase their fees to pre-consortium levels.

At this point, there is no reason to presume that this effort will end any differently. Any business that is lured into this space had better be careful and apprise themselves of the history of these projects. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who are promoting this initiative. But I suspect that they have little historical memory of what they are proposing and they may be a bit naive. Time will tell.

As Fox News Goes Up, The GOP Goes Down

Posted by on August 10, 2009 at 4:04 pm. 7 Comments :

Last month I published an article on how Fox News Is Killing The Republican Party. It explored in detail how the embrace of lunatics and their demented ravings, along with a misunderstanding of the television marketplace, was literally dragging the Republican Party down to some of its lowest historical depths:

“The more the population at large associates Republican ideology with the agenda of Fox News, and the fringe operators residing there, the more the party will be perceived as out of touch, or even out of their minds.”

Now Gawker has affirmed my analysis with a chart showing the divergent prospects of Fox News and the Republican Party. I took the liberty of modifying their chart to spotlight the period following last November’s election (amongst other things, like the demise of the GOP logo).

It couldn’t be much clearer. The post-election fate of Fox News is diametrically opposed to that of the GOP. The disparity has increased sinced November and shows no signs of letting up. Gawker sums it up nicely saying…

“Fox News’ viewership is up 45% over the last year, and it’s easy to see why: The ascendancy of a charismatic black Democrat has driven frightened, paranoid, enraged, nativist zealots into the ideological embrace of an outlet that habitually reconfirms everything they already believe. Watching Glenn Beck’s spell-binding sermons on Barack Obama’s racism is comforting to people who believe that their way of life-namely, one in which fatherly white Christians protect us from danger both internal and external-is under attack. So they do it more frequently. Tuning into Hannity et.al. becomes a life-affirming political act.”

Nuff said.

Fox News Is Killing The Republican Party

Posted by on July 24, 2009 at 11:56 am. 38 Comments :

The case was made long ago that Fox News is a blight on the media map. It is bad for journalism. It is bad for Democracy. It is bad for America. A so-called “news” network that repeatedly misinforms, even deliberately disinforms, its audience is failing any test of public service embodied by an ethical press.

I, personally, have made the case for an embargo of Fox News by Democrats and progressives (see Starve the Beast: Part I, Part II, Part III), documenting via studied analysis that there is no affirmative value to appearing on Fox News – a network that has established itself as overtly hostile to the Democratic message and its messengers.

However, there is another side to this that has not been addressed previously. Republicans might be well advised to avoid Fox News as well. There is a case to be made that Fox News is demonstrably harmful to the Republican Party. In fact, it may be the worst thing to happen to Republicans in decades. That may seem counter-intuitive when discussing Fox News, the acknowledged public relations division of the Republican Party. Fox has populated its air with right-wing mouthpieces and brazenly partisan advocates for a conservative Republican agenda. They read GOP press releases on the air verbatim as if they were the product of original research. They provide a forum where Republican politicians and pundits can peddle their views unchallenged. So how is this harmful to Republicans?

If all we were witnessing was the emergence of a mainstream conservative network that aspired to advance Republican themes and policies, there would not be much of note here. Most of the conventional media was already center-right before there was a Fox News. But Fox has corralled a stable of the most disreputable, unqualified, extremist, lunatics ever assembled, and is presenting them as experts, analysts, and leaders. These third-rate icons of idiocy are marketed by Fox like any other gag gift (i.e. pet rocks, plastic vomit, Sarah Palin, etc.). So while most Americans have never heard of actual Republican party bosses like House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, posers like Joe the Plumber and Carrie Prejean have become household names.

Fox News has descended into depths heretofore reserved for fringe characters. They are openly promoting the wackos who believe that President Obama is ineligible to hold office because he isn’t a U.S. citizen. They feature commentaries by secessionists and even those calling for an overthrow of the government and the Constitution. This explains how folks like Ralph Peters, a retired military officer who said that the Taliban captors of a U.S. Soldier would be saving us a lot of trouble and expense if they would just kill him, earn airtime on Fox. Peters previously told Fox News that he favors military strikes against media targets. This explains how Glenn Beck can agree with a guest that it would be a good thing if America were attacked again by Osama bin Laden. And don’t even get me started on Victoria Jackson, who has joined an ever-lengthening line of psycho-Chicken Littles who compare the President to Hitler.

Good Advice:
“If crazy ideologues have infiltrated the news business, we need to know about it.”
~ Bill O’Reilly, 7/16/09

The list of loonies extends to politicians like Michele Bachmann, entertainers like Ted Nugent, and of course, the talk show pundits like Rush Limbaugh, whose maniacal rantings are elevated by Fox into their version of political dialogue. It’s a dialogue that is consumed with ACORN conspiracies and Manchurian presidents. The problem is that by elevating bona fide nutcases, they are debasing honest and informed discourse. The mental cases are crowding out any reasonable voices that might exist amongst the more moderate Republicans (if there are any left). Fox appears to have made a tactical decision to permit the inmates full run of the asylum.

As a result, the Fox News audience is being dumbed down by a parade of paranoid know-nothings. This strategy appears to be successful for Fox in that it has attracted a loyal viewership that is eager to have their twisted preconceptions affirmed. The conflict-infused fare in which Fox specializes is a ratings juggernaut – just like any good fiction. However, this perceived popularity is having an inordinate impact on the GOP platform. By doubling down on crazy, Fox is driving the center of the Republican Party further down the rabid hole. They are reshaping the party into a more radicalized community of conspiracy nuts. So even as this helps Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line, it is making celebrities of political bottom-feeders. That can’t be good for the long-term prospects of the Republican Party.

With the Fox network unabashedly promoting the most ridiculous rumors, myths, and nightmares of the rightist fringe, moderate and independent Americans will grow ever more suspicious of the Fox/GOP agenda. Most Americans do not believe that Sonia Sotomayor is a racist; or that FEMA is constructing concentration camps; or that we are on a march toward socialism, communism, fascism, or whatever the right is peddling this week. Most Americans do not believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, a reptilian alien, or the anti-Christ. In short, most Americans think that the loopy yarns spun by Fox News are fables told by madmen – and believed by even madder men and women who wallow in their doomsday utopia.

Fox News is fond of boasting about their ratings dominance. It is a daily occurrence and the structural core of their argument that they reflect the mood of America. The GOP has bought this argument in its entirety. So it is important to note here that success in the Nielsen ratings has no correlation to public opinion polling. The ratings only measure the program choices of Nielsen’s survey participants. That is a subset of the population at large, and not a particularly representative one. It is a sample focused on consumers, not voters. And its respondents are just those willing to have their TV viewing monitored 24 hours a day, which skews the sample in favor of people who aren’t creeped out by that. What’s more, viewing choices are not necessarily an endorsement of the opinions presented in the program. There are many reasons people choose to watch TV shows, the most frequent being its entertainment value. So any attempt to tie ratings to partisan politics is a foolish exercise that demonstrates a grievous misunderstanding of the business of television.

As for what constitutes success in the television marketplace, due to the broad diversification of available programming, it doesn’t take much to be heralded as a hit. A mere 3 share (3% of people watching TV) will land you in the top 10. For cable news the bar is set even lower. In fact, the top rated show on the top rated cable news network (The O’Reilly Factor) only gets about 3 million viewers. That’s less than 1% of the American population. It’s also less than World Wrestling Entertainment, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the CBS Evening News (the lowest rated broadcast network news program). By contrast, America’s Got Talent is seen by 12 million viewers – four times O’Reilly’s audience.

Numbers this low ought not to inspire much excitement from political operatives. Nevertheless, Republicans are riding the coattails of Fox News as if it were representative of a booming conservative mandate in the electorate. They are embracing Fox’s most delusional eccentrics. This is leading to the promotion of similar eccentrics within the party. Which brings us the absurd spectacle of the network’s nuts interviewing the party’s pinheads.

The inevitable result of this system of rewarding those farthest from reality is the creation of a constituency of crackpots. It is an endorsement of the philosophy brewed by the Tea Baggers that espouses racism, tyranny, and armed revolt. It is enabling a frightening corps of openly militant adversaries of democracy, free speech, and Constitutional rule. It is the sort of environment that produced the murders of Dr. George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns.

This is a textbook example of how the extreme rises to the top. It is also fundamentally contrary to the interests of the Republican Party. The more the population at large associates Republican ideology with the agenda of Fox News, and the fringe operators residing there, the more the party will be perceived as out of touch, or even out of their minds. It seems like such a waste after all of the effort and expense that Fox put into building a pseudo-journalistic enterprise with the goal of confounding viewers with false news-like theatrics.

Make no mistake, Fox News is still managed by hard core party patrons. And I’m not referring just to opinion-driven commentators like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity, although they are bad enough. No, I am talking about executives and editors like CEO, Roger Ailes, former Nixon and Bush media consultant. I’m talking about Washington Managing Editor and VP, Bill Sammon, an avid right-wing alum of the Washington “Moonie” Times. I’m talking about Business News Chief and VP, Neil Cavuto, antagonistic interrupter extraordinaire. And let us not forget the head hype-master, Rupert Murdoch, whose UK operations were just discovered to have been unlawfully wiretapping celebrities, politicians, and even members of the Royal Family. Augmenting that executive roster are the GOP regulars who are straight out of the just retired Republican White House: Karl Rove, Dana Perino, John Bolton, Dan Senor, and Linda Chavez. And then there are the Fox News clowns…er…“contributors” like Dick Morris, Ann Coulter, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Bernie Goldberg, Michele Malkin, and on and on. If nothing else, Fox is a full-employment program for rightist weasels (and they also operate the Conservative Book Promotion Club).

The mission of Fox News from its inception was to be more than just a voice of opposition to Democrats. It was to utterly crush the left end of the political spectrum leaving only a teetering right wing with no counter balance. Yet, despite the torrid embrace between Republicans and Fox News, it is apparent that Fox is the source of a sort of friendly fire that is decimating the GOP by exalting its most outlandish and unpopular players. And since Republicans have not been particularly popular anyway lately, the anchor being thrown to them by Fox can’t be all that helpful – – – Except to Democrats.

Don’t Believe The Hype About Fox News Ratings

Posted by on July 1, 2009 at 3:49 pm. 12 Comments :

As the numbers come in for the second quarter, cable news networks are all putting on their best spin to wrangle positive stories that promote how much better they are than their competition. It’s an age-old ritual that pits marketing flacks against one another as they jostle for position and advertising bucks. And nobody does this more relentlessly than Fox News.

Everywhere you look you can see the effect of Fox’s PR blitz. They proudly boast that they have increased viewership in the 25-54 demographic 50% over Q2 of 2008 (Monday-Sunday, primetime). Simultaneously, they taunt MSNBC and CNN for falling off 2.6% and 19.2% respectively. The core of their message is that, along with continuing their leading position in cable news, they are also outpacing their rivals in growth. That’s an argument that requires a little further exploration.

Fox News has typically been the slowest growing cable news network. Up until about a year ago, they were the only network that regularly posted declines, which they did for a couple of years running. So what happened in the last year that appears to have interrupted that trend?

Recall that during the second quarter of 2008, the Democratic Party was still embroiled in a fiercely contested primary for president. The Republican primary had been effectively over since February. So interest in campaign news tilted away from the GOP network (aka Fox). What’s more, Democrats had forsworn appearing in debates sponsored by Fox News. The result was that MSNBC and CNN benefited noticeably by their coverage of the most compelling news events of the season, while Fox had to be satisfied with interviewing themselves and squawking from the bleachers. Consequently, Fox’s ratings for Q2 of 2008 were 2.3% lower than the same period in 2007. By comparison, MSNBC was up 46.9% and CNN was higher by 21.7%.

By outperforming Fox so spectacularly, from a growth perspective, in 2008, it makes for difficult comparisons in 2009. So a far more interesting analysis would be to remove the unique circumstances of the 2008 presidential campaign year, and compare performance from 2007 to 2009. In that race, Fox still did pretty well gaining 47.2% over the two year span. However, MSNBC was close behind with a 42.7% gain. CNN, while not keeping stride with the others, was still not as far behind as represented in the single year comparison. They were basically flat (-1.7%).

None of this diminishes the fact that Fox is still the runaway leader according to Nielsen, an increasingly unreliable source that even Bill O’Reilly considers to be less than honest. And although he pretends to be opposed to big-government interference and regulation, he hypocritically declares that…

“The bottom line on this is there may be some big-time cheating going on in the ratings system, and we hope the feds will investigate. Any fraud in the television rating system affects all Americans.”

Fox’s ratings success is more likely due to the cult-like brand loyalty of the rightist, delusional demographic. But it is still disheartening because their ratings dominance rewards them financially for lying and advocating terrorism. However, on a positive note, MSNBC was the number one cable news network among 18-34 year-olds. This continues a trend that suggests that the next generation of news consumers will be rejecting Fox News and its ilk.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to tolerate Fox’s bragging while putting it into perspective. They still have fewer viewers than SpongeBob SquarePants. Their highest rated show (O’Reilly) still has about a third of the viewers of broadcast TV’s lowest rated news program (CBS Nightly News). And there is real consolation in knowing that, while they win on the Idiot Box, they are losing at the ballot box.

Cable News Trek: The Next Generation

Posted by on June 3, 2009 at 1:41 am. 7 Comments :

Fox News has been reveling in their post-election ratings bump. By all appearances it is really just a pity party for the losers who are congregating at the Fox water cooler to assuage their misery. But I have to give them credit for having such unparalleled devotion to their demon host.

In the just released ratings for May, Fox retained its first place ranking. MSNBC moved solidly into second place. But there was some little noticed news that may whip up a little anxiety Fox programmers:

MSNBC is the #1 news network among younger viewers, Adults 18-34, in weekday primetime (93,000), M-Su primetime (89,000), and in M-Su sales prime (7 p.m.-2 a.m., 72,000). “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” was the #1 show at 8 p.m. in A18-34 (118,000).

This is a continuation of a trend wherein Fox is saddled with the oldest skewing audience in cable news. MSNBC, however, is winning amongst younger viewers, who are the future of the news consuming marketplace. That bodes well for MSNBC as this demographic group grows into the advertiser-favored 25-54 demo.

In the meantime, Fox can celebrate having cornered the market for aging political outcasts.

Starve The Beast: The Wrath Of The Right

Posted by on March 2, 2009 at 9:45 am. 11 Comments :

We are now a month into the administration of Barack Obama. It’s a month that seems to have been packed with a year’s worth of activity. From the first day in office when Obama issued executive orders permitting more openness with presidential records and Freedom of Information Act requests, to announcements of major policy agendas for an economy on life support and the still soul-sapping wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House has been busy, to say the least.

At the same time, they have had to deal with the opposition of an increasingly obstructionist Republican minority and a media that is overtly hostile. Last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Hannity’s show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. Glenn Beck was brought in to shore up the daytime crowd. Neil Cavuto, a bully who is every bit as obnoxious as O’Reilly poisons the economic news, and he is also managing editor of Murdoch’s Fox Business News. And just this week Bill Sammon, author of a shelf full of bitterly partisan books, was promoted to VP and Washington Editor for the network.

The result is a full court press of some of the dirtiest political assaults ever waged by what is advertised as a “news” network. Fox News is shamelessly pushing a campaign to characterize Obama as a Socialist – a committed opponent of America and its values – from 6:00 am with the crew of Fox & Friends, to after midnight with broadcasts and repeats of their primetime neanderthal shoutcasters. They get their marching orders directly from Rupert Murdoch who last September said that…

“[Obama’s] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960’s socialist.”

Even worse, these rightist dissidents come very close to openly advocating acts of violence and armed rebellion. Glenn Beck’s ominously titled “War Room” was an hour long descent into fear mongering that posited nothing short of the decline of western civilization. The upshot of this Terror Hour is that America’s days are numbered, so you had better start stockpiling guns, hoarding food and water, converting your dollars to gold, and barricading your secluded compound in the Wyoming wilderness (move over Ted Kaczynski). And, of course, it’s all Obama’s fault.

Another result of this Apocalyptic programming surge is higher ratings for Fox News. The core primetime schedule on Fox has enjoyed a rare uptick in audience growth. For the past three years, Fox, while number one in total audience, has been the slowest growing network in cable news. CNN and MSNBC produced consistently stronger growth. Particularly MSNBC, which was once a struggling also-ran, but which now challenges Fox’s powerhouses and routinely beats CNN. But the numbers for this February are another story.

Total Day: FNC +29%, MSNBC +17%, CNN +2%.
Primetime: FNC +28%, MSNBC +23%, CNN -30%.

What accounts for the turnaround in Fox’s fortunes? Well, first of all, they are benefiting from their previous slack performance. In other words, they were able to record higher comparative rates of growth because their prior year numbers were held down due to some rather unique circumstances. To understand the current numbers, you need to remember what was going on a year ago.

In February of 2008 the Democratic Party was in the middle of a hotly contested presidential primary. Early in the month it was already apparent that McCain would win his Party’s nomination. Consequently, audiences viewing campaign news were disproportionately composed of Democrats. Amongst the biggest draws were the televised debates. Democratic candidates, you may recall, had forsworn Fox News as a host for their debates. So the two Democratic debates held in February 2008 were carried by CNN and MSNBC, and both drew audiences many times greater than their regularly scheduled programming. Democrats also shunned Fox for other TV appearances and interviews. It had gotten so bad that Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, made a veiled threat in December of 2007:

“I think the Democrats are damn fools [for] not coming on Fox News.”

We know the problem still existed in March of 2008 because that’s when Wallace debuted his Obama Watch: a clock that would record how long before Obama appeared on Wallace’s show. It was a childish prank on Wallace’s part, but it clearly showed that the Democratic embargo of Fox News was having a real impact. For CNN and MSNBC, who had the guests and the event programming that appealed to the most motivated news consumers, it meant higher ratings. Fox, on the other hand, had depressed numbers because their most loyal audience – Republicans – already had a candidate, so there was no campaign drama to keep them tuned in. Comparing those numbers to February 2009 would, therefore, be favorable to Fox by producing a greater percent difference.

So some of the good news for Fox was really just a matter of perception. But that’s not the whole story. They are actually having a pretty good year, particularly post-inauguration. All the networks have suffered some falloff from January, but Fox has retained more of their recent gains than have their competitors. I can only offer some informed speculation as to why that would be.

First, Fox has more new programming that may be piquing the interests of their viewers. The new programs include a retooled Hannity, minus Colmes, and Glenn Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue. Beck has found his home at Fox. His ratings have significantly increased over what he had at HLN, and he has also improved the time period he fills on Fox. As for Hannity, dumping Colmes was obviously popular amongst the Foxian pod people. It’s just that much less non-approved, pseudo-liberal noise they have to sit through.

Secondly, by heating up the aggressive tone, Fox has fashioned a hearth around which despondent conservatives can huddle. In 2006 they suffered the loss of both houses of congress. Now they have lost the presidency as well – and to what they view as an unpatriotic, Muslim, elitist, intent on driving the nation to Socialism in a Toyota hybrid. So now they congregate in the warm red glow of the Fox News logo that provides them the comfort that comes from numbing propaganda and the righteous smiting of perceived enemies.

This doubling down on rancor has had mixed results for Fox. While it endeared them to their base, and those they could frighten into submission, it also cost them dearly on a broader financial scale. The stock of Fox News parent, News Corp, is down 70% for the last 52 weeks. To be sure, the economy, particularly for media companies, was difficult, to put it mildly. But News Corp competitors Time Warner, Disney, and even the Washington Post were only down in the 45-55% range. News Corp suffered its worst loss ever of over $6.4 billion. And going forward, they advised Wall Street that income will decline another 30% for fiscal 2009.

In examining the reasons that Fox would perform so much worse than similar enterprises, one would have to consider the possibility that people have become disgusted with the obvious one-sided manipulation and the non-stop, phony news alerts that are Fox’s shock in trade. But I believe that it would also be fair to conclude that the direct actions taken against Fox News by Democrats last year are at least partially responsible for Fox’s inordinately more severe decline. The ratings disparities year over year document the effect that a sustained campaign of snubbery can produce.

Starve The BeastWith the stepped up efforts of Fox to sling ever more buckets of mud, it is more imperative now than ever that Democrats act affirmatively in their best interests. They must resist the siren call of televised glory and begin to discriminate between those who are fair practitioners of journalism and those who seek only to engage in slander and slime. In two previous installments of my Starve The Beast series (part 1 / part 2), I described how complicity with Fox News is not merely a waste of time, but is demonstrably harmful. This is even more true today, as the evidence above illustrates. The message that Democrats and other progressives must take to heart with all deliberateness and determination is: STAY THE HELL OFF OF FOX NEWS! Since it hurts us when we appear and it hurts them when we don’t, the way forward is crystal clear. It makes absolutely no sense to lay down before lions who are determined to devour you.

Now, I don’t want to approach this from a purely negative standpoint. While constructing a united front in opposition to Fox News is an absolute necessity, there are some positive steps that can be taken as well. Other news organizations must be pressured to present a more balanced picture of current events. And, where possible, true liberal voices must gain access to the televised public square. Media Matters long ago documented the imbalance of conservatives and Republicans on the Sunday news programs. That ideological discrepancy has continued apace since Obama’s inauguration. Now it’s time to do something about it. It’s time to make a case for TV to offer a more equitable representation of liberal views – the views of the majority, the winners.

Political activism has always been shaped in part by access to polling. It is an irreplaceable asset for anyone managing a campaign for a candidate or an issue. Similarly, TV survey data is critical in analyzing media performance and prospects. This data is distinct from conventional polling. Remember, networks don’t care about the public. They care about a subset of the public that is attractive to their customers. And their customers are not viewers – they are advertisers. While there are many sources for political data, there are few for media data – and most of those are press releases from vested corporate interests. There is little that we can do with ratings data that has already been massaged to advantage one particular party.

If progressives want to have some influence on programming, they must be able to anchor their arguments with original research and facts. For this reason, it is no longer enough for sites like Media Matters or Talking Points Memo or Daily Kos or News Corpse to merely document right-wing media abuses. If we want to help shape the editorial direction of the Conventional Media, we have to offer authoritative presentations to map a path to bigger audiences and ratings victories. We need to speak to the needs of the news providers and give them a business case for adopting a truly balanced programming model. To do this we need access to the raw data that is at the heart of television marketing.

So who amongst the lefty netroots will step forward and subscribe to Nielsen Media Research broadcast and cable data? I’m going to rule out News Corpse because I can’t afford it. But I do have 14 years of experience in media research and would be willing to help produce analyses and presentations. Just as progressive authors and bloggers offer informed advice to advance political goals, we need to be able to make a persuasive, market-based case for the sort of programming reform that we want to see. We need to be able to show the networks that it is in their interest, financially and ethically, to develop programming that is honest and in keeping with the principles of an engaged and probing press. We need to be able to counter the false impressions relentlessly pushed by faux news enterprises that tout themselves as the popular voice of the nation. It seems that a day does not go by that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t boast about his ratings. The funny thing is that he also condemns the source of those ratings with the delusional paranoia that only he can muster:

“The bottom line on this is there may be some big-time cheating going on in the ratings system, and we hope the feds will investigate. Any fraud in the television rating system affects all Americans.”

So O’Reilly thinks that the system he so proudly cites for affirmation of his massive popularity, is also engaging in big-time cheating for the benefit of his foes. If he’s right, and Nielsen data is not to be trusted when they report that his competition is catching up, than why should we trust it when it reports his success. In truth, the only cheating going on is on the part of the self-promoting networks and the egomaniacal personalities they employ. It is their selective and misleading interpretations that are distorting the reality of viewer behavior.

Suffice it to say that we would be in a much better position to dispute the spin that’s being peddled if we had access to unfiltered Nielsen data. We could mine that data to develop solutions and strategies to present to news programmers. Then we may begin to have some influence over news programming, personalities, and content.

This is as important an endeavor for progressives as the strategies we promote for politicians. I would argue that it’s more important. Especially in a media environment where prominent news enterprises are openly fomenting a near-militaristic antagonism to our representatives and our values.

MSNBC Celebrates Strongest 2008 Growth

Posted by on January 2, 2009 at 4:50 pm. 9 Comments :

Once again, MSNBC has demonstrated its dominance over the stodgy CNN and the rightist snake oil of Fox News. MSNBC’s programming grew more than twice as much as Fox during 2008:

The fact that this was an election year raised the numbers of all of the players, but in the end Fox took its usual place at the bottom of the scale of growth. On the other hand, MSNBC was the only network to finish the year with more viewers post-election than their average for the year. That’s because their rate of increase far exceeded what was given back after November 4, when audiences predictably declined.

As the new year kicks off, the battle for cable news supremacy will only heat up. MSNBC will continue to rely on of its powerhouse one-two punch of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown and the Rachel Maddow Show. Both programs continue to drive the network’s growth. CNN is sticking with the status quo. Their schedule is little changed for the year, with the exception of adding Campbell Brown, who hasn’t really made her presence known.

Fox News, however, is making several changes that seem to be geared to digging an even deeper conservative hole. This year saw the hiring of right-wing stalwarts like Karl Rove, Judith Miller, and Mike Huckabee, as well as Foxocrats and Obama opponents Lanny Davis and Howard Wolfson. In addition to that, they are losing Alan Colmes and debuting what they call a new “pure” Sean Hannity solo show. I’m sure they are happy to have filtered out the contaminants. Hannity also signed a multimillion dollar contract renewal, as did Bill O’Reilly. Brett Baier, a reliable Fox ideologue, is succeeding Brit Hume as anchor of their signature news program, Special Report. And later this month will see the premiere of Glenn Beck’s new program on the network for which he was born to work. His obnoxious, immature, fact-free squealing will fit right in on Fox.

These uber-conservative reinforcements called in by Fox News suggest that they are preparing for a new offensive directed at the incoming administration of Barack Obama. It’s hard to see any other justification for such a hardening of their right flank when political winds are shifting in a more centrist, post-partisan direction. Consequently, in the new year, Democrats and progressives had better be vigilant and prepare for an onslaught of contemptuous attacks from the Murdochian Empire. Their troops are amassed on the border and the rising sun is illuminating a determined and disturbing red dawn.

Post-Election Cable News Ratings: Good News For MSNBC

Posted by on November 19, 2008 at 4:56 pm. 3 Comments :

The presidential election was a boon for the news business, especially cable TV news. All three players boosted their year-ago numbers, but it was not an equal opportunity affair.

Network Prev Week +/- Prev Year +/-
Fox -30 +40
CNN -58 +36
MSNBC +40 +143

Once again, MSNBC delivered far stronger growth numbers than any of its competitors. And once again, that growth was driven by Keith Olbermann’s Countdown and the Rachel Maddow Show. MSNBC was the only cable news net to close the post-election week with more viewers than the prior week.

It’s still hard for MSNBC to get any respect, though. The article linked above from Media Week sports the headline, “No Post-Election Slump for Fox News.” Without closely reading the article, one might think that Fox was the big beneficiary of the campaign season. But the numbers show a completely different story. Which just goes to show you, even media reporting about the media can’t be trusted. My headline is far more accurate.