This may not come as a surprise to most people who are paying attention to the media landscape, but another survey by Nielsen reveals that African-Americans are not very well represented in the Fox News audience. The latest numbers from Nielsen, as reported by Mediaite, show that only 1% of Fox News viewers are Black.
However, this does explain how Fox can be so brazenly racist in so many of their broadcasts without worrying about the consequences. After all, they have little to lose by offending a segment of the television universe that doesn’t watch their programs anyway. Combine that with Fox’s partisan incentive to suppress Democratic votes and their strategy of inflaming racial animus for political gain doesn’t seem so bad in their warped perspective.
Four years ago News Corpse reported that the Black viewership for Fox was a dismal 1.38%. So, if you can believe it, that meager showing has actually declined since then. The breakdown is an indictment of the rightist network’s bigoted marketing objectives that ignore the diversity of the country and badly trail the racial composition of their competitors. Mediaite writes that…
“During the primetime hours of 8-11 p.m., MSNBC’s audience is 24% black, CNN’s audience is 16% black and Fox News’ audience is just 1% black. By comparison MSNBC’s primetime audience is 67% white while CNN’s is 73% white and Fox News’ is 92% white.”
With numbers like that it is no wonder that Fox can describe Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z as a “former crack dealer,” dismissing his many years as a successful artist, businessman, and philanthropist. It is why Fox anchor Megyn Kelly is comfortable declaring as a fact that Jesus and Santa Claus are white. It is why virtually every time there is a controversial story that tests the racial tolerance of the nation (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Voter ID, Immigration, etc.) Fox News takes the side of the white majority. It is why whenever there is an allegation of racism against a person or institution, Fox’s kneejerk response is that racism doesn’t even exist anymore.
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The argument that racism ended after the slaves were freed is one that has been expressed by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and many other Fox contributors. Some of the more open-minded Fox commentators assert that racism ended more recently with the election of President Obama, conveniently forgetting that nearly half the country voted against him. But the consensus among them is that anyone who alleges prejudice is a “race hustler” and that there is no such thing as “white privilege.”
So, is the low number of African-American viewers of Fox due to the content of the programming, or is it the brazenly racist programming that has driven away Black viewers? It hardly matters at this point because it is clear that Fox no longer cares and doesn’t believe that they have any obligation to cater to an audience demographic that has almost completely abandoned them.
The problem is that that means they also don’t feel any obligation to the racial diversity and harmony of America. Sadly, we can count on Fox to continue to continue to incite the bigots that flock to their network, and the end result will be to create more division and to encourage distrust and hate. Here’s an example what that kind of agenda will produce.
