Michael Wolff writes for USA Today about the state of play in the cable news business. In other words, how Roger Ailes is king and everybody else is a wannabe. He marvels at Fox's continued dominance thereof.
COTTonLINE has written before about this phenomenon, and the underlying numbers that make it not just possible but unavoidable. Roughly half of Americans are conservative. On the other hand, all of the major mainstream media except Fox News and The Wall Street Journal are liberal.
Do the math. Fox News gets all the consumers of conservative opinion TV; CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS share the consumers of liberal opinion TV. You can imagine Ailes saying to himself, "I'll take half, you guys share the other half among yourselves." Everybody but Ailes is playing a chump's game.
The same is largely true among the newspapers with national aspirations: The Wall Street Journal takes the conservative readers, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, etc. take the liberal readers. USA Today really tries to be evenhanded, not always successfully, but offers what could charitably be called "news light."
