In what may be a bullish sign for America’s IQ, Fox News suffered the biggest ratings decline of all the cable news networks from January 2010 to January 2011.
Hopefully this means that television viewers are getting tired of brazenly biased news coverage that foments division, spreads disinformation, and insults the intelligence of the audience.
The past year has seen some of the most blatant propagandizing by the disreputable crew at Fox. They were caught deliberately lying about global warming and health care. They were exposed for donating millions of dollars to right-wing politicos. Their role in inciting violence became a headline story itself. An academic study proved that the more you watch Fox News the stupider you get. A recent poll revealed that Fox News is the least trusted news network.
Glenn Beck was particularly hard hit. He lost 40% of his total audience and fully half of viewers in the critical 25-54 year old demo. And he is still losing advertisers as well. It is long past the point where any reputable business would have cut this loser loose. But Fox News is run by political activists, not journalists. And there may even be a fear factor involved in that Fox execs may be afraid of angering Beck’s mentally unstable disciples. In any case it is clear that Rupert Murdoch is not a businessman, he’s a crusader for his confederacy greed.
The legacy of ill repute had to catch up with Fox sooner or later. Granted, Fox is still the number one cable news network, but they are headed in the right direction. Time will tell if this is the start of an era of enlightened television viewers or a temporary dip into sanity. But it is a promising development that will be watched closely in the weeks and months to come.
Mark is really Glen Beck’s liberal alter ego.
Always keeping mind that one whole segment of the political perspective goes to ONE source for “news” while the rest split their news viewing among many sources. If there were ONLY two news sources, Fox would not have this lead in viewership.
What great fiction. Keep up the good work!
Haha, yeah, because MSNBC is the cradle of intelligence. It’s as big a joke as Fox, just on the other side of the political street. I have to give them a little credit for showing Keith Olbermann (the liberal version of Beck) the door. Now if they would do the same with Rachel Maddow, they would maybe begin to attain a tiny bit of credibility.
If you’re interested in news, start by turning off the TV.
Uhm…no. MSNBC is not the equivalent of Fox News, and Olbermann wasn’t the equivalent of Glenn Beck. In fact, those ideas are so far removed from reality that they are borderline psychotic.
Both FOX News and MSNBC have their faults but those faults are not common. One wouldn’t say, “Cancer and influenza can both kill you so they are the same thing.”
As for Rachel Maddow, I would be interested in knowing any particular way she approaches Glenn Beck. As far as I know she has made a few mistakes and apologized for them, as any reasonable news columnist would. As far as I know, Maddow has never advocated violence or been the de facto guiding force behind a out of mainstream political movement as Beck has with the Tea Party. As far as I know Maddow has never attempted to charge her viewership for a “college” that propagates alternative reality “Christian Nation” lies.
Of course, I could be wrong and might be missing that the idea that one who leans left and one who leans right are exactly the same no matter their actions and the outcomes of those actions. After all, a sport fan who cheers his team is just as wrong as the opposing sport fan who clubs him for it.
The problem is that those of us who have long considered ourselves (and WERE considered) to be in the center, or as moderates, have been relabeled by the right as leftists. By their new barometer, the center has moved to the right.
That’s the whole plan, give a few extremists some power, put them in the spotlight for a while and soon it becomes more than effective to bitch and complain that everyone else isn’t just liberal or a democrat, or a moderate repub, but make the serious (as in not kidding) accusations of real socialism and the destruction of the country forever. The thing about extremists is they think it’s all the way their way or we all die. The worst part is the worst of them have TV and radio shows.