If TV ratings mean anything, and for the last half century plus we have believed they do, then the story in this
Los Angeles Times article is good news (pun intended). Johanna Neuman writes that
Fox News is kicking butt. She leads off with:
Maybe it just means that anger sells. Maybe it means that television has gone niche, appealing to core audiences rather than the middle. Or maybe this really is, at heart, a conservative nation. Whatever the reason, the trend is clear.Voted out of office in 2006 and 2008, Republicans are now the Party of Opposition. And their network of choice, Fox News, is now king.
So what is the evidence that
Fox News is "king" of cable news?
Just-released ratings for the first quarter of 2010 show that CNN is in a precipitous free-fall, its prime-time hosts losing half their audience. (snip) Ratings on MSNBC plunged too. Conservatives are hailing the ratings news as more evidence of a "liberal media death spiral." Meanwhile Fox News, which broke records last year, continues to grow.
Everybody thinks this is odd, and it isn't. Most national mainstream news sources are liberal, without realizing or admitting it. The nation is sort of split politically. So, all of the liberal sources (
ABC, CBS, NBC, NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC) have to share the half of the populace that is liberal, while
The Wall Street Journal and
Fox News have the conservative half all to themselves. Coincidentally, they are growing while everybody else is shrinking. This isn't rocket science, folks, it is simple arithmetic.
