The latest White House attempt to marginalize Fox News was on display this weekend. In separate interviews, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod attempted to say that Fox really wasn’t news. They both went on to say that Fox does things to make money.
Quick, someone contact ABC, NBC and CBS! I think we have a news flash!
There was a time where the “Big 3” nearly financed the rest of their viewing offerings with the money they made off of the commercial revenue of their nightly news broadcasts. As recently as 1980, nearly 55 million people nightly, watched the Big 3 network news each evening. Last year that number was down to 25 million. In the latest week, less than 21 million people watched the Big 3, a drop of nearly 20% from just last year. The chart below shows the steady downward trend of network news viewership of the past 3 decades:
If that all wasn’t bad enough, in a recent survey, the total percentage of people who identified one of the Big 3 as the news organization they turned to most was a combined 27.3%. That number for the Big 3 was down almost 3% from 2007. In the same survey, Fox news was identified as the news organization people turned to the most by 28.4%, up nearly 2% since 2007.
I’ll bet the White House thought the Big 3 folks generated “news” when they made lots of money. Are they now saying that NPR is the only arbiter of what is and isn’t news? I suppose with all of the newspapers that are going out of business due to lack of subscribers and profit, they could also be purveyors of “news?”
Does the White House really believe that their words will convince those who trust or rely on Fox news not to? Well, if they believe we buy the line about our insurance not changing with Placebocare, I suppose they could believe this as well. The problem is, too many folks have now learned the line and repeat each time they hear a whine from the White House about how someone has maligned them, “Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
