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Ratings slip for scrappy Fox News

The upstart channel still influences competitors, but viewership lags.

By ERIC DEGGANS
Published October 17, 2006

The Fox News Channel shows Fox & Friends, Studio B with Shepard Smith and The Fox Report with Shepard Smith will be broadcast Tuesday from the Don Cesar Beach Resort in St. Petersburg as part of the newschannel's 10th anniversary Thank You America Tour. Fox& Friends airs from 6 to 9 a.m., Studio B airs at 3 p.m. and Fox Report airs at 7 p.m.

The Fox News Channel, which started out in life as a conservative yet scrappy upstart, turns 10 years old this month.

But even as its stars and top executives bask in news stories, glitzy celebrations and a 10-city tour to celebrate its ascension as cable's most-watched news channel including broadcasts today from the Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa in St. Pete Beach, one inconvenient fact sticks out.

Fox News' viewership is down the first eight months of this year about 13 percent in prime time, compared with 2005.

Some critics say the culprit is America's growing disenchantment with the Republican Party and President Bush, dimming enthusiasm for a channel many regard as the GOP's biggest TV booster. Fox officials have blamed a lack of Hurricane Katrina-level stories in 2006.

So you might expect Fox News to dread possible election wins for Democrats.

You would be wrong.

"It'll be terrific," Fox News Channel owner Rupert Murdoch recently told the trade journal Multichannel News. "People will be watching Fox News like crazy."

That's because one of the biggest elements of Fox's complex formula for success is looking like an underdog - even when it isn't.

Proclaiming itself the "fair and balanced" alternative, Fox has built its brand as a home for those dissatisfied with the media establishment, succeeding so well that it has forced competitors to clone its strategies.

"We sort of decided (in 1996) the context for the news was important," Fox News Channel creator and president Roger Ailes said this summer. "Now, some people have biases against us. ... Maybe we were a little too in-your-face at times. ... (But) sometimes, there's more than one point of view to the story, and we try to reflect that."

Still, given that the news channel hasn't changed its prime-time lineup more than four times in 10 years, a shakeup seems inevitable. Already, Fox News has revamped its daytime schedule, establishing new shows for up-and-coming talent such as newsreader Jane Skinner and former CNN anchor Bill Hemmer.

"Most of Fox News' energy came from 9/11, and the war in Iraq gave them a huge shot in the arm they haven't been able to recapture," said Brian Stelter, editor of the TVNewser blog. "A lot of what we see on Fox has to be viewed through the prism that they're desperately trying to keep your attention."

A Fox spokeswoman did not arrange interviews with on-air personalities or executives for this story.

Still influential

Despite its ratings woes, Fox continues to influence competitors. With a formula likened to televised talk radio, Fox juices news reports with eye-catching visuals and sound, while building pundit shows around distinctive, aggressive, ideologically conservative personalities.

Marquee names such as Bill O'Reilly (a longtime critic of the St. Petersburg Times) and Sean Hannity are bold, traditionalist crusaders - inspiring copycats such as Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, along with CNN Headline News' Glenn Beck.

This mix of conservative politics and tabloid-tinged coverage drew a crowd that pulled Fox ahead of CNN's viewership in 2002.

"They were essentially the most efficient media operation in terms of getting a potential audience," said MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, whose ratings have risen amid his criticism of O'Reilly and the GOP. "But I don't know how many more people can watch them from when they hit their apex. Ninety percent of the people who wanted something like Fox News seem to be watching them."

Fox News expatriates such as Paula Zahn and Rita Cosby have landed at CNN and MSNBC, respectively. Lou Dobbs - whose reinvention as a crusader on immigration reform and America's struggling middle class echoes Fox's mix of news and punditry - has found new visibility at CNN.

Fox News proved that such personalities are key to keeping viewers when news is slow.

"So much of TV news is imitating Fox," said Jeff Cohen, a liberal pundit who appeared on Fox News Watch and CNN's Crossfire before producing Phil Donahue's show for MSNBC in 2002. "When I was at Donahue, (executives) were ... pressuring us to imitate Fox."

Cohen, who wrote about his time at Fox in the new book Cable News Confidential, attributes Fox News' success to courting conservative, older viewers. That viewer loyalty allows Fox to present even more liberal voices than competitors, Cohen said.

"I went to MSNBC and saw executives who were totally clueless about their mission, with an overwhelming fear of appearing liberal," he said.

Opinion tactics

Critics say Fox anchors often use open-ended questions to wedge opinions into news coverage. When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez insulted President Bush, Stelter said, this question aired on Fox: "Taking cheap oil from Hugo Chavez: Act of Treason?"

But Matthew Sheffield, executive editor of the conservative-leaning media criticism Web site Newsbusters.org, sees Fox as the only TV outlet that regularly features truly conservative voices.

"When Roger Ailes started the network, he realized there was animus in the journalism community to more conservative perspectives," said Sheffield, who co-founded a Web site, RatherBiased.com, dedicated to proving former CBS anchor Dan Rather's liberal bias. "Fox allows conservatives to be more than peons and grunts."

Comic Dennis Miller - a Bush fan who recently returned to providing weekly commentaries for Hannity & Colmes - shrugged off reports that senior vice president of news John Moody once regularly distributed memos dictating pro-conservative coverage.

"It makes me laugh where Fox is thought to be this unholy cabal where people are given marching orders ... (because) nobody ever said a word to me. I think the reason you triple everybody else's ratings is because, at some point, the majority of the American people think you tell the truth."

The criticism and recent ratings challenges haven't kept Ailes - a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Reagan and the elder Bush - from expanding his influence. He also is chairman of Fox's owned-and-operated stations (including Tampa's WTVT-Ch. 13), and is working on a 2007 launch for the Fox Business Channel.

"It's gone from people literally laughing at us in the first press conference, to where we're out there every day beating the competition and, I think, building some of the greatest news careers in the history of television," Ailes said in July.

"It's not quite as odd as it might appear from the outside."

Eric Deggans can be reached at deggans@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8521. See his blog at blogs.tampabay.com/media.

[Last modified October 17, 2006, 05:17:29]