Fox News’ ratings tank

August 30, 2006

Alex Koppelman offered an encouraging report late yesterday on the state of [tag]Fox News[/tag]’ [tag]ratings[/tag]. I’ll give you a hint: they’re going in the wrong direction.

Somewhere, Keith Olbermann is sticking pins in a Bill O’Reilly voodoo doll: Fox News’ ratings, TVNewser reports, are down since August of last year. Like, way down. Like down 28 percent in primetime among all viewers, down 20 percent in primetime in the “money demo” (viewers aged 25-54) and down 7 percent in daytime viewership overall. In fact, the only place Fox is up is during the day, when they managed a ratings increase of just 2 percent, and even then only in the money demo.

And lest you think this is an industry-wide trend, consider this: over the same time period, CNN and [tag]MSNBC[/tag] are up. [tag]CNN[/tag]’s up 35 percent during the day — 46 percent in the money demo — and up 21 percent in primetime overall, 25 percent in the money demo. MSNBC’s ratings increases aren’t quite as impressive — up 6 percent in primetime overall, 8 percent in the money demo, and up 36 percent in the money demo during the day, 26 percent overall.

This is very much in line with what we learned in June, when Broadcasting & Cable, a trade publication for the TV industry, reported that Fox News’ ratings are “dropping precipitously.”

About two years ago, Matt Yglesias described FNC pretty well. “Fox is not ‘[tag]biased[/tag]’ or even ‘[tag]opinionated[/tag]’ — it certainly isn’t [tag]ideological[/tag],” Yglesias said. “It’s an arm of the [tag]Republican[/tag] Party, a group of vicious hatchet-men leavened by occasional doses of Alan Colmes, David Corn, and Jim Pinkerton.”

With this in mind, perhaps Fox News’ deteriorating ratings are a reflection of the GOP’s weakening position?

Perhaps people are waking up. Maybe now the MSM will stop hiring unqualified, biased, hack liars to appease the Fox beast.

Right.

  • Fox. Home of the blackest sitcoms and the whitest pundits. What the hell is their demographic?

  • To be completely fair, you might want to point out that Fox still has a substantially larger market share than MSNBC does. Sure, the trends are reversed… but nobody should be decieved about the overall numbers. For the record, I detest Fox as being blatantly, overwhelmingly biased, and I’m a big Olbermann fan… I just like to get enough of the facts straight to avoid misperceptions.

  • Will CNN interpret this as people looking for truth (like they use to do) or as pay off from putting on Glenn Beck et al?

  • Fox News’ deteriorating ratings are a reflection of the GOP’s weakening position?

    Probaby, but keep in mind that CNN has made an obvious effort in the last year to pander to the FoxNews audience and MSNBC put together a prime-time lineup mostly of ultra-conservatives (other than Olbermann, though Carlson and Cosby seemed to have lost their shows last time I checked), so it might just mean right-wing viewers who make up the majority of cable news’ target audience now have more alternatives.

  • Obviously this story is not complete without an analysis of the position of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

    I suspect that Americans are actually starting to understand that Faux News is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Republican’ts and their failing Bushite Administration.

  • Does anyone ever keep track of Rush Limbaugh’s market share on radio? Is he gaining or losing listeners?

  • I think the reason the right is really starting to lose ground, Fox included is they are pushing the envelope too far.
    Fox and the conservative movement in general was pretty subtle in its innuendos and half-truths. Now they just straight up ignore the truth.

    For an organization like Fox and conservatives to keep people interested/scared/upset they have to keep the hype alive and to do that you have to keep pushing. And at some point they push too far and it becomes counter-productive. Like the war on Christmas, they make this big to-do about nothing, get people all worked up, so this year, that war has to go further, it has to escalate to be relative. And because the actual talking point doesn’t exist, they either have to find something so unbelievable obscure and/or just make up facts to support their position. And at some point it loses it’s effect.

    My point is Fox is hitting that point where they are detaching so far from reality, that only the most guidable still believe their brand of news. Ditto for Bush and Cheney.

  • Obviously, ratings are NOT to be believed. I mean, sheesh, how can they be missing the massive amount of televisions that Cheney has tuned in to Faux News?

  • Maybe they’ve finally picked up on the fact that FOX is the RNC’s communications arm. If Americans can come to understand — I know, that’s asking a lot — that GOP officeholders are officeholders (and pretty bad ones at that), then we’ve won half the battle.

  • In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz: “Ha ha.”

    I think this is actually pretty important. Fox is largely responsible for the garbage going into the American decision making process, so with less garbage in, maybe we’ll get less garbage out.

    CNN sucks pretty badly too, so it’s just a theory.

  • “Leavened” by Alan Colmes? Gimmie a break! Fox knows it makes Hannity look better to have the very stereotype of a pasty liberal next to him. And no matter what Susan Estrich may say, she sounds like fingernails on a blackboard.

  • I think the problem with Fox’ ratings is that other cable stations in large markets have started showing re-runs of “Hee Haw” and “Murder She Wrote” against O’Reilly and Hannity. That’s got to siphon off the pool of viewers.

  • It’s a risky business model to have to depend on your customers being so brainwashed that they don’t have the mental wherewithal to click the remote one last time out of sheer boredom before they totally lose the ability to act independently of the Faux News signal.

    Pure shuck and jive as a substitute for reality may have an expiration date. Maybe folks who notice that their minds are smelling stinky when they open the door will realize their news has gone bad. Way past time to throw it out.

  • robrtl,

    LOL. I wonder if Larry The Cable Guy’s career will suffer when these same viewers find out he ripped his entire schtick off from Junior from Hee Haw. Sad thing is, Larry’s jokes are cornier.

    Have to admit that, while the comedy was cheesy, the music was often really good. I was channel surfing the other day and stumbled on a Hee Haw music segment with Roy Clark, Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer and a bunch of other Nashville studio guys doing “Take The A Train”. It was an overplayed standard evn in the 70’s, but their version sounded fresh as hell.

  • Tosser,
    I agree with you about the music. I looked everywhere for Roy Clark et al. playing Take the A Train but couldn’t find it. Sounds interesting.

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