FOX NEWS TV RATINGS TAKE A NOSEDIVE

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

Slumping Fox celebrates 10th anniversary

Fox News Channel will mark its 10th anniversary this week in an unusual position: knocked back on its heels. The network is in the midst of its first-ever ratings slump. Cable news' most stable lineup is being juggled. And the blow-up over President Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace suggests that Democrats are attacking Fox because they perceive the same vulnerability in the network as they do in the Bush administration.

And

But the years of explosive growth have ended at Fox. Viewership over the first eight months of the year was down 5 percent compared to 2005, with a steeper 13 percent decline in prime-time, according to Nielsen Media Research. For 12 straight months, Fox's prime-time audience has been smaller than the year before. Meanwhile, CNN viewership inched up 5 percent this year through August. On a typical day this year, Fox's audience is 845,000 while CNN's is 466,000.

"It's hard," Ailes said, "to win the Super Bowl every year."

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While I don't want to start celebrating Fox's demise too early, I can't help but get some satisfaction over this. As Fox chief Roger Ailes observes in the article, they're still in first place, all day long, by very comfortable margins, but this is the first time in propaganda network's history that they've lost ground in terms of audience numbers. The obvious conclusion to make is that because Americans are getting sick of Republicans, they're also getting sick of the GOP's biggest media cheerleader. I think it's safe to say that Fox is going to continue to be a news media player for years to come simply because some thirty percent of the US electorate really does believe that "fair and balanced" isn't a bald faced lie, and that the terrorists really do "hate our freedom." Other Americans, however, who were freaked out by 9/11 and then comforted by the artificial testosterone spewing forth from the orifices of Fox's colorful cast of demagogues, have slowly come, after witnessing countless bigtime Republican blunders that not even Fox could successfully spin positively, to their senses. That's a good thing.

You know, if the weak-kneed Democrats are unable to take Congress in November, it might not be such a bad thing: two more years of self-destructive Republican rule may be just what it takes to permanently discredit the Conservative Movement. That would be an even better thing.

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