Time Magazine - Fox News Is On The Run
Time Magazine thinks the day’s of Fox News Channel are numbered
Fox is still the top-rated news channel, but there are signs it’s plateauing. Its ratings started to lag in 2006, and in February, CNN’s prime time (boosted by several presidential debates) beat Fox among 25-to-54-year-olds for the first time since 2001. (CNN and TIME are owned by Time Warner.) Maybe even more galling, the network has lately faded in the ephemeral category of buzz. MSNBC–with far fewer viewers–has been the political-media obsession of the 2008 primary, largely because of feuds between the Clinton campaign and the network for its perceived pro-Obama bias.
Ratings shmatings: if a Rupert Murdoch network cannot dominate the field of ticking off the Clintons, that has to sting.
But for better or for worse, Fox became the signal cultural artifact of the Bush era, so it will need to remodel itself again. A President McCain could actually represent the trickiest shift. No matter how he has repositioned himself since 2000, he’s still the Republican who knocked Rumsfeld and criticized 24, on Fox’s sibling broadcast network, for glamorizing torture. Worst of all, the “liberal media” like him, which would play havoc with Fox’s us-vs.-them, fair-and-balanced formula.
