BillOReilly Column Fox Hunters, Shooting Blanks By: BillOReilly Staff Thursday, January 1, 2015 Since its time for New Years predictions, heres one that is pretty much a sure bet: Fox News will dominate the cable ratings in 2015, just as it has for the past thirteen years. CNN will be a distant second, with MSNBC dragging up the rear, playing the role of the Washington Generals to FNCs Harlem Globetrotters. Fox News may be the biggest media success story since the broadcast networks were formed in the 1950s. FNC crushes its competitors and is consistently near the top among all cable programs, not just news shows. Simply put, FNC is on fire, even after all these years. That raises two obvious questions. Why the big success? And why do so many media types and leftists (pardon the redundancy) absolutely loathe Fox? The success part is twofold. There is no question that FNC leans to the right in that it gives conservative voices a prominent place on the air. Prior to Foxs inception, no other TV news operation did that. So conservative Americans tune in for long stretches, as do fair-minded Americans from the political middle. More importantly, Fox News is never boring. There are smart hosts, provocative guests, and lively debates around the clock. FNC takes chances and does things differently, while many other news programs simply recite the days events or spend months droning on about one story. CNN did that in 14 when it obsessed over the missing Malaysian Airlines plane, while MSNBC devoted countless hours to Chris Christie and Bridgegate. After that scandal turned out to be much ado about very little, MSNBCs already-anemic ratings totally collapsed. Of course, Fox News unleashes a special brand of deranged fury in its competitors and the ideologues running many of the nations newspapers. They dont like the traditionalism and they seethe at the channels success. Thus, on any given day, you can see scathing personal attacks on FNC and its hosts. Why the rage? After all, nobody is forced to watch. If you dont like Megyn, Sean, Bill, and Greta, the Food Network surely has something youll find more appetizing. A couple of months ago something very interesting happened when Americans went to the polls in the midterm elections. After casting their votes, many of them apparently settled in to watch Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly, and the crew report the results. Fairly and with balance. At 10 PM on election night Fox had 6.6 million viewers, far more than any of the traditional big three networks. Meanwhile, CNN and MSNBC had about 3.5 million viewers ... combined After a year in which MSNBCs primetime audience dropped by 18%, Fox News now has more than triple the number of viewers. And the fact is that MSNBCs ratings cant get a whole lot lower. It is a cable channel that promotes left-wing causes and hands over one full hour each evening to Americas most dishonest racial demagogue. Even the New York Times, MSNBCs ideological soul mate, recently pointed out that the network has sunk to new lows and has been surpassed by CNN. The slogan Lean Forward now seems like a big joke for a network that is moving backwards. Just this week MSNBCs boss conceded that it has been a difficult year. Difficult? Jonathan Gruber, the Tampa Bay Bucaneers, and Rolling Stone magazine had better years than MSNBC! Meanwhile, Fox News has become an entrenched part of the national fabric, a vibrant network that influences the debate in this country. Way back in 1996, when the Fox News Channel was born, could anyone have guessed that it would become so successful? And ... so despised?
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 01:26:00 +0000