Day: 6/4/2011

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show Is More Popular Than Fox News

Posted by on June 4, 2011 at 3:03 pm. 6 Comments :

The recent May ratings data revealed the weakness of Fox News, particularly when compared to their competitors. But Fox is also getting whipped by an old adversary about whom their CEO, Roger Ailes, once said…

“He openly admits he’s sort of an atheist and a socialist. […] He hates conservative views. He hates conservative thoughts. He hates conservative verbiage. He hates conservatives. He’s crazy.”

That attack on Jon Stewart came right after Ailes said of the folks at NPR that “They are, of course, Nazis.” And who can forget Bill O’Reilly dismissing Stewart’s audience as a bunch of “stoned slackers.”

Well, Stewart is getting the last laugh. His program on Comedy Central averaged 2.3 million total viewers this May and was 19% higher than May of 2010. The Fox News primetime lineup for May averaged only 1.85 million viewers and declined by 10%. In fact, Stewart beat every program on Fox in total viewers except for Bill O’Reilly. However, projections for demographic breaks of 25-54 and 18-49 suggest that Stewart beat even O’Reilly, likely delivering twice as many demo viewers as O’Reilly.

Jason Easley at PoliticusUSA provides additional detail as well as the observation that Stewart’s victory was achieved in the late night time period against Fox programs that air in primetime.

“This is why Fox News both hates and fears Jon Stewart. Not only is he more popular than they are, but he devotes much of his program to exposing the biased reporting of FNC. […] He is literally teaching his audience, which is bigger than FNC’s, how to see through the partisan propaganda that Rupert Murdoch has based his network on.”

The May ratings book also noted that MSNBC is the number one cable news network among 18-34 year-olds. This reinforces the growing conclusion that the next generation of television news consumers is rejecting the Fox News model of a hyperbolic, sensationalized, rabidly partisan, lie factory. Young viewers are clearly more discriminating, more intelligent, and more open to diverse news sources. That is a formula that can only contribute to Fox’s problems as they continue to lose market share.

Fox is a network that relies on a closed loop of information and opinion to keep their audience ignorant and obedient. They can circulate their disciples amongst their own programs, talk radio, and a few sanctioned web sites, but they cannot tolerate free-thinking individuals. The young viewers who made MSNBC first in the category, and those who watch the Daily Show, can’t be fooled into attending Tea Parties or believing that the president is socialist Muslim from Kenya. So the more impact programs like the Daily Show have on illuminating the inanities and hypocrisies of the media, the better for our society, our country, and our world.

Neil Cavuto Preaches Economic Apocalypse

Posted by on June 4, 2011 at 11:01 am. NO Comments :

Yesterday marked the end of a bad week on Wall Street. The market declined all of 2.3% for the week. So if you haven’t already escaped to your bunker in Idaho you may want to pack up the kids, the rations, and the gold coins, and hit the road.

As usual, the prophet of the financial End Times is Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. He is to business what Glenn Beck is to…well, everything else. Cavuto spent the opening minutes of his program on Fox News insisting that America was in a state of deep decline and that no recovery has occurred, or will occur. He later shuttled over to his program on Fox Business Network to announce that the economy had “flatlined.”

Does he mean this economy?


A truly fair and balanced analysis of the situation would recognize that there has been a substantial move to the upside since President Obama was inaugurated. Over the past two years there has been a 43% increase. Compare that to the two years prior, during the Bush administration, that saw a 36% falloff.

The primary argument Cavuto is making for the catastrophe he perceives is that the market has been negative for 5 straight weeks. Of course, knowledgeable analysts never draw conclusions from such short periods of time. The chart above demonstrates why that is not considered wise practice. What Cavuto is spinning as a catastrophe is really a mere 5% drop over a long trend of gains.

This is nothing new for Cavuto or Fox News. They consistently hammer on any negative market activity while ignoring the positive. If the market goes down it is because of the looming Obama depression. If it goes up Fox labels it a bear market rally. Fox is so determined to deny Obama credit for anything positive that they once went so far as to claim that the Tea Party was responsible for market a rally – and that was a rally that began weeks before the Tea Party existed.

Later in the program Cavuto engaged in what he regards as a debate, but is really just him interrupting his guest after every four words. Democratic congressman Chaka Fattah put up a valiant fight to present the facts about the employment statistics that show significant increases over the past couple of years despite recent weakness. But Cavuto would have none of it, cutting off Fattah repeatedly to spin the data as negatively as possible while treating his guest with overt rudeness. Seriously…no Democrat should ever go on that show or that network.

The Fox News financial reporting has been nothing but atrocious, They have been predicting disaster since January of 2009. Anyone who took their analysis seriously missed one of the strongest periods of growth in this nation’s history. I sure hope nobody is taking them seriously now.