Fox News No Longer Number One

Posted by on April 2, 2008 at 1:55 am. 24 Comments :

Continuing a long pattern of decline, Fox News once again underperforms its competitors. The first quarter of a presidential election year can generally be expected to boost viewership for news networks. For CNN and MSNBC this has been markedly apparent. For Fox News…not so much.

As a result of the hyper-growth of CNN’s prime time schedule (persons 25-54), they actually finished ahead of Fox News for the first time in six years. Another quarter like this and Fox will finish third behind both CNN and MSNBC.

The stagnation of Fox’s audience can be traced in part to the downward spiral of the Bush presidency. Fox has long tethered its fortunes to a conservative ideology that has fallen out of favor. Now they have trouble attracting either viewers or guests from the more moderate and/or progressive population. They also have an age problem. Fox News has both the oldest skewing audience and the oldest prime time line-up. That combination produces a staleness that is reflected in their ratings. It’s ironic that the Republican candidate for president is also the oldest to ever run for the office. He should be a perfect fit for Fox, if not for America.

In addition to CNN’s win over Fox in the average ratings statistics, Fox has fallen to fourth place (with 24.5 million) in cumulative ratings, behind CNN (33.2), MSNBC (28.4), and Headline News (25.9). Cumes represent the number of the network’s unique viewers and are arguably a more precise measure for news programming (explanation here).

So contrary to the boasting of Fox News narcissists, they are not the ratings juggernaut that they would have you believe. In fact, sooner than many might have predicted, they will be reduced to also-rans. In advance of that you can expect that they will fiddle with their programming to deliver even more sensationalistic, high decibel, conflict-driven fare that virtually drips with steamy melodrama, controversy and a nightmarish dread of Muslims, immigrants and Democrats.

Fasten your seatbelts.

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Clinton Continues Embrace Of Right-Wing Media

Posted by on March 31, 2008 at 1:01 pm. 5 Comments :

Hillary Clinton and her campaign has displayed the most overt fondness for right-wing media of all the presidential contenders, including Republicans. She has agreed to participate in Fox News-sponsored debates when her Democratic colleagues have declined. She accepted donations from Rupert Murdoch. Just last week she sat for an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and its owner Richard Mellon Scaife, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to smear her and her family.

This morning Scaife published an editorial that praised Clinton as having “courage and confidence” and proclaimed that his impression of her is now “a very favorable” one. Can Scaife expect this endorsement to be taken seriously when he has previously accused her of everything from financial corruption to murder? A couple of other inconsistencies to ponder: Scaife is in the midst of an ugly divorce with an ex who supports Obama. And Scaife has contributed the maximum allowed donation to John McCain.

Also this morning, Clinton surrogate and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell appeared on Fox & Friends to say that “Fox has done the fairest job, has remained most objective of all the cable networks.”

Perhaps Rendell was referring to the steady stream of Obama bashing as evidence of their fairness.


John McCain’s Ad: Connecting The Dots

Posted by on March 30, 2008 at 3:33 pm. NO Comments :

Upon closer examination of John McCain’s new campaign ad, some interesting messages become apparent…

John McCain's Kool-Aid

Announcer: Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong. Do not yield […] we’ll never surrender.

Was that McCain or Jim Jones? No matter. The ad goes on to ask, “What must a president believe about us?” John McCain believes we’re idiots whose views are irrelevant. When challenged on the state of the war in Iraq he harrumphes, “We’re succeeding. I don’t care what anybody says.” Then he yells at the kids to get off of his lawn.

The ad closes with the redundant declaration that McCain is “the American president Americans have been waiting for.” I suppose he’s just being precise so you don’t think that he’s talking about the Swedish president Americans have been waiting for; or the American president Brazilians have been waiting for.

Maybe we should appreciate his specificity, or maybe he just needs everything explained to him twice. He’s already confessed that he doesn’t understand important subjects like the economy or AIDS prevention, and he’s clearly demonstrated his ignorance of the Middle East. If he is the president Americans have been waiting for (which should read “the president for whom Americans have been waiting”), then we have seriously lowered our standards. Cue H. L. Mencken:

“As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

I thought that applied perfectly to Bush, but McCain is rapidly becoming a contender.


The Media’s Gift To John McCain

Posted by on March 28, 2008 at 4:55 pm. 3 Comments :

What is being called the first general election campaign ad has hit the airwaves. It is a biographical ad for Sen. John McCain that features him in a North Vietnamese hospital bed. Most of the Conventional Media is reporting on this as if it were somehow newsworthy. The New York Times covered the ad’s release on its political blog, The Caucus, and they have shown the same level of cluelessness as every other media outlet. In demonstrating how little they seem understand even the simplest truisms of modern candidate marketing, they note that the ad…

“…for now will play only in New Mexico – a sign that the campaign expects that state to be a major battleground this fall.”

The Times doesn’t provide any support for their contention that the New Mexico ad buy is a sign of the campaign’s view of the state’s role in the upcoming election. They haven’t interviewed the candidate or queried the campaign managers. They haven’t provided any context such as the ranking of the state in the electoral college (36th, with only 5 electoral votes). They simply make a dangling statement that fails to inform the reader of any substantive facts, and they present it as if it were verifiably true.

And the Times is not alone. Here is how the Associated Press covered it:

“For now, the 60-second ad will air only in New Mexico – a signal that McCain plans to compete in that swing state come the fall…”

And this is CNN’s take:

“The ad will air for now in the battleground state of New Mexico […] a sign the presumptive nominee will focus heavily on the swing states this fall.”

Sound familiar? Did these guys synchronize their alibis?

The truth, however, is likely quite different than these portrayals suggest. The McCain campaign, like most politicians and interest groups these days, knows that they can purchase a small amount of airtime in inexpensive television markets like New Mexico and announce the release of the ad to the press. Then the media will dutifully regurgitate the ad repeatedly, giving the campaign what amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free airtime.

The McCain people know that they can manipulate the media to serve their ends. The media knows that they are being manipulated, but they allow it anyway. It should make one wonder what these big media corporations expect to get in return for their willingness to be exploited. After all, if they declined to provide free promotion for theses ads, the candidates would have to pay for them. That means the media is not only making valuable in-kind contributions to the candidates, they are also forfeiting untold millions in lost revenue. For what?

I previously wrote about this phenomenon with some historical examples of its use. I also recommended these reforms:

  • Don’t bother to report on any ad that has not exceeded a defined threshold of paid impressions. In other words, if the campaign doesn’t make a significant purchase of air time for their own ad, it isn’t news.
  • If the ad is shown it should be confined to a small percentage of the screen with a video watermark over the whole piece labeling it is a campaign ad. This would serve to blunt the promotional value of the airing and focus on the news value.

The press needs to start thinking about ways to be better servants to the public than they are to the powerful. But first they need to acknowledge their shortcomings. For the New York Times, the AP, CNN, etc., to make the wholly unsupported assertions that they did in the articles linked above is shameful. For them not to acknowledge their role in the campaign hype is an abdication of their journalistic integrity. They know better. They just hope that we don’t.


Clintonstein Meets The Scaife Man

Posted by on March 25, 2008 at 6:04 pm. NO Comments :

Hillary Clinton was interviewed yesterday by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. She took the opportunity to continue a pattern of personal attacks on her opponent, Barack Obama:

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

What’s interesting about this encounter is not the rough and tumble tenor of modern electioneering. That has sadly become all too familiar in these dog days of democracy. What rattled my antennae was the venue Clinton chose for these remarks.

Clintonstein Meets The Scaife ManThe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is owned by billionaire right-winger, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife has a place all his own in what Clinton herself tagged the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” He is a principal in, or contributor to, rightist political and media organizations like NewsMax, the Media Research Center, the American Enterprise Institute, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Spectator.

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, Scaife funded investigations into the Clinton’s public and private lives that was as expansive as it was incredulous. He promoted allegations of sexual infidelities, real estate scams, drug running, even the murder of Clinton aide Vince Foster. Through his newspapers, books and films, he relentlessly sought to destroy the Clinton administration and reputation via smear and innuendo.

Independent Prosecutor Ken Starr, who came to head the official Clinton inquisition, was unable to prove any allegation or to succeed in producing a conviction in the Clinton impeachment. However he was later named the inaugural dean of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, which was created with an endowment by Scaife.

It would have been bad enough for Hillary Clinton to sit down with the Tribune-Review staff given the facts set forth above. But this meeting was more than an editorial gathering. Amongst the participants was head honcho himself – Richard Mellon Scaife.

How could Clinton sit across the table from the man who has made the most vile accusations against her and her family? According to her it was for a lark. She said it was…

“…so counterintuitive that I thought it would be fun to do.”

To allow herself to be questioned by Scaife after his smear campaign against her requires a measure of cognitive disconnect that seems superhuman. It certainly isn’t an afternoon of playful recreation. And what makes this even more bizarrely unthinkable is that she cavorted with her abuser in order to cast abuse at her Democratic rival.

Clinton has previously shown poor judgment in this campaign with regard to the media. She accepts donations from Rupert Murdoch and recently agreed to participate in a Fox News-sponsored debate (which did not take place because Obama declined the invitation). But this transcends any mere deficiency of judgment. What justification is there for submitting yourself to questioning from a man who falsely accused you of murder and other atrocities? Is the need to exploit every media availability so overwhelming that nothing is too repulsive?

If there wasn’t a photograph of it, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Clinton & Scaife
Hillary Clinton and Richard Mellon Scaife

Where exactly are the outer limits of her ambition?

Update: The outer limits are apparently not at distributing articles from the American Spectator, the same magazine that Scaife used to accuse her of murder. The Clinton campaign is circulating a Spectator article that accuses Obama adviser, and former Air Force chief of staff, Merrill McPeak of antisemitism. If she expects people to believe the Spectator’s allegations about McPeak, should we also believe their allegations about how she murdered Vince Foster?


A Tucker Carlson Post Mortem

Posted by on March 25, 2008 at 12:06 pm. NO Comments :

Tucker Carlson - True Washington StoryThe first full week of the post-Tucker era on MSNBC validates the long overdue decision to cancel the perennial loser. David Gregory’s new program, “Race for the White House,” outperformed Tucker by 35% (Gregory’s first week vs. Tucker’s last week). What’s more, on Friday, Gregory was the second highest rated program on MSNBC’s evening schedule (trailing only Countdown and beating Hardball). He also came in second against his competition, surpassing Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room on CNN. Tucker never came close to these achievements.

While Gregory’s show is a conventional affair that doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from the cable news mediocrity, at least it isn’t hosted by an aggressively obnoxious (and obnoxiously aggressive) trust-fund pundit with a grating personality. That was probably worth 15% right off the bat.

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Harold Ford Ditches Fox News For MSNBC

Posted by on March 24, 2008 at 5:11 pm. NO Comments :

Harold FordWhen former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, Jr. signed on as a Fox News contributor last year, he made himself available to be exploited as a Fox News Democrat. That meant his remarks would be employed to disparage other Democrats and put a bipartisan mask on Fox’s rightist propaganda.

Well, apparently the honeymoon is over. Today Ford appeared on MSNBC’s Race For the White House, David Gregory’s new show. Ford is still a conservative from the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the party, but his views will be taken more seriously as an MSNBC commentator than as a hit man for Fox. Time will tell if he can regain some semblance of a reputation.


Bill Kristol’s Call For Benign Neglect On Race

Posted by on March 24, 2008 at 12:05 pm. NO Comments :

William Kristol’s latest column for the New York Times responds to Barack Obama’s recent speech on race and actually advocates sweeping the whole issue under the nation’s rug.

Kristol begins with an itemization of bits of Obama’s speech that don’t make him shudder. In fact, you can feel the shuddering vibrate off the page as he uses this editorial ploy to list his objections to the thoughtful questions Obama raised in his forthright address. But the real message Kristol espouses is prominently displayed in his headline: “Let’s Not and Say We Did.”

What he is referring to is engaging in a national conversation about race as initiated by Obama last Tuesday. Kristol declares that:

“The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: ‘But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.’

As soon as I heard that, I knew what we’d have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race.”

In Kristol’s tunnel-vision view of the world, a discussion of race is an ordeal to be “endured” rather than an opportunity for reconciliation and understanding. To Kristol, the prospect of pursuing real progress on civil rights is akin to shudder-inducing torture.

His suggestion that editorial boards and others would respond to Obama with a “stampede” of articles thoroughly fails to observe that such articles were appearing before Obama even gave the speech. In fact, had Obama said nothing, there would have been a stampede of columns brimming with outrage at his neglect of such an important matter, with Kritsol leading the charge. The issues that Kristol regards as important also deserve some attention:

“What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like.”

Those are the very issues that Obama tackled in subsequent speeches last week. But rather than guide the debate into matters that he agrees “can lead to real change,” Kristol chooses to focus on the issue that makes him shudder.

Kristol’s solution to racial problems in America today is to reach back forty years to the Nixon era artifice of “benign neglect.” That was the Pat Moynihan hatched notion that there was too much talk about race and that, if everyone would just shut up, we could make some real progress. But the evidence that that plan would not work is present in the fact that Kristol himself won’t shut up. He and hundreds of other pundits are still choosing to write about race when other pressing matters, like the economy and war, have been raised by all three candidates after the groundbreaking speech by Obama.

There is a reason that race is being so closely followed by politicians, the people, and the press. It is still a sensitive issue for many Americans and, in case Kristol hasn’t noticed, we have a candidate who could become the first black president in the country’s history. I, for one, am not afraid to endure a stampede of public discourse on race. It would be far better than Kristol’s advice to keep our heads firmly planted in the sand.

Email Bill Kristol.


Fox Business Network Ad Deliberately Dishonest

Posted by on March 24, 2008 at 3:16 am. NO Comments :

A couple of weeks ago, CNBC’s Jim Cramer was asked by an emailer if he should liquidate his account at Bear Stearns. Cramer said:

“No! No! No! Bear Stearns is not in trouble. If anything, they’re more likely to be taken over. Don’t move your money from Bear.”

Shortly thereafter, Bear Stearns stock collapsed and the company was taken over by JP Morgan Chase. Cramer himself has been castigated and ridiculed for his response from many quarters, and now the Fox Business Network is piling on with a new ad:

The only problem with the ad and other criticism is that Cramer was right. The critics are either being deliberately dishonest or they have a severe case of attention deficit disorder. The emailer was asking specifically about Bear Stearns’ liquidity and whether he should close his deposit account. He was not asking about the company’s stock value and Cramer’s response had nothing to do with that. Cramer correctly pointed out that the company’s depositors would be fine because the Federal Reserve guaranteed those funds and that the worst that would happen is that another firm would acquire them. That’s exactly what did happen.

But that hasn’t stopped Fox from publishing a deceitful ad that misrepresents Cramer’s advice. It’s actually kind of funny that the ad’s tagline is “Turbulent Times Call For A Credible Network.” Credible? You mean like a network that doesn’t lie in their advertisements? I think this would be a more appropriate ad:

I’m no apologist for Jim Cramer. He has a pretty lousy track record on stock recommendations. And for a TV personality who behaves like a clown, he violates the most important rule for a clown – be funny! However, when he’s right he shouldn’t have to take heat from the likes of Fox – the network that, on their first day of broadcast, featured the “Naked Cowboy“ offering financial guidance.

For the Record: On July 13, 2007, FBN’s current Managing Editor, Neil Cavuto disputed reports of the economy’s weakness saying that he “[didn’t] believe a word of it.” Since then the Dow has dropped 1,469 points (10.6%), the mortgage market has thrown thousands into foreclosure, and now a financial powerhouse has been reduced to rubble. That’s the sort of credibility you can expect from FBN which calls itself: The Network You Can’t Afford To Miss. More like: The Network You Can’t Afford To Watch.


Karl Rove’s Blogger Smackdown

Posted by on March 21, 2008 at 4:12 pm. NO Comments :

Karl Rove may have been Bush’s Brain, but the nimrods at NewsBlusters are the ones who seem to be in need of gray matter reinforcements. NB’s Matthew Sheffield did an interview with Rove that is downright hilarious.

The first question dealt with why wealthy conservatives do not invest in media, whereas wealthy liberals do. [Pause for laughter] Sheffield didn’t bother to cite a single example of a wealthy liberal media investor, and Rove answered the question as if the premise wasn’t nonsense.

“I think wealthy conservatives are busy investing in profit and job creation and enterprise and wealthy liberals, many of them either from the media industry themselves or from – recognize the value of communications and are more ready to put money into a less profitable enterprise, namely the media.”

Rove ignores the fact that his new boss, Rupert Murdoch, deficit-financed Fox News for five years, and it is still less profitable than CNN despite having more viewers; his New York Post has never made a profit as long as he’s owned it; the newly hatched Fox Business Network is struggling to stay afloat; and he purchased MySpace for over half a billion dollars though it had never, and still has not, made a profit.

As for conservative investors in the media, Sheffield and Rove might want to familiarize themselves with former GE chief Jack Welch; or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Washington Times; or former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer of Freedom’s Watch, a $200 million propaganda factory; or the Heritage Foundation; or the American Enterprise Institute; or Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal al Saud (of the Saudi Sauds) who is a significant shareholder in both Time Warner in News Corp.

When asked about the Internet, Rove came out swinging at liberal blogs saying that…

“…most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.”

[Pause for laughter] But that’s not the funniest part. When asked why there are more liberals in the Blogosphere, he said…

“I hate to sound sort of diffident about it but it strikes me that a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things and the idea of spending a lot of time on the internet and taking their talents and displaying them there is not something they really do.”

[Still laughing] Bear in mind that he was speaking to a blogger. Did Rove intend to insult him as a loser who had no life? Or is it only liberals who blog because they have nothing else to do? Another reason that people on the right are not “taking their talents” to the Internet may be because they haven’t got any – witness Sheffield.

Rove returns often to the theme of blogging as something conservatives haven’t the time for. He says they have more “active lives;” or they are “busy investing in profit;” or they are “not completely absorbed in politics;” or that they “have other enterprises and charitable efforts.”

If all of that were true, then what does it say about the conservatives who do stoop to blogging? And why does he want them to do it more? Does he want their lives to be more shallow and vacant as he imagines the lives of liberal bloggers to be? I also wonder how Rove reconciles the claim that conservatives have more profitable endeavors to pursue with the claim that conservatives tend to engage more in philanthropic activities. Which is it – are they helping themselves or helping others? It hardly matters because, according to Rove, being charitable is a compliment to conservatives but an attack on liberals. And the same is true for being wealthy.

What’s really funny is that NewsBlusters published this incoherent, contradictory spew as if it were somehow newsworthy. Sheffield didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by Rove’s insults. Nor did he pick up on any of the obvious contradictions. I can’t say that I expected much more from the NewsBlusters team, but I do appreciate a good laugh.