Fox News only news net to show YOY growth, leads in prime | Hacker News Reader

Fox News only news net to show YOY growth, leads in prime

mediapost.com

24 pointshhs15 comments

And honestly why wouldn't they?

Who is their competition? CNN? They seem to be in a competition to piss off as many different groups as they can. MSNBC? Always an underdog there, but they've never been able to find a focus. They got rid of the one person who tried to drive them to one, Keith Olbermann, a long time ago and never recovered. Meanwhile against that backdrop, Fox has an extremely open relationship with "ethics" while everyone else is trying to bend over backwards (...and failing) to convince you they're ethical.

To put it in everyone's favorite brand of analogy, Fox is driving a racecar and everyone else is on a fixed gear bicycle.

Do any of CNN and MSNBC's audience even have cable anymore? It seems dumb catering to younger people when they've been cutting the cable coord for more than a decade now. If you want to make money on cable, you need to go after older people who are more likely to go be conservatives.

> To put it in everyone's favorite brand of analogy, Fox is driving a racecar and everyone else is on a fixed gear bicycle.

Fox is driving an El Camino from the 70s, but everyone else has moved on to something other than cars, so they still win.

Fox also consolidates an entire ~35-45% of American public opinion, while the other networks split up the rest.

Contrast this with the fact that cable subscriptions are in steep decline:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...

The more interesting part of this is, who has cable anymore? This is completely from personal experience. But I am in my late 20s. Everyone I served with in the Navy around my age (20 to 30) had Netflix and Hulu, not DirectTV. Even now in the civilian world, I don’t find anyone under 40 with cable or satellite TV. Even a few people over 40 I know dumped conventional TV years ago and use AppleTV.

TV New ratings for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, are they really still relevant to discourse? Would it be better to use internet rankings?

Old people have cable. And they tend to be the most reliable voters.

Don't want to sounds like an asshole, but they are not great for banking on the future because, well 'soon....' They are a shrinking class of voters (at least old voters who have cable). Especially since people my age will one day be old, but probably won't subscribe to DirectTV (or w.e your regional offerings are), we will just be old assholes with Netflix.

I guess we should relate it news papers. Older cable viewers are probably starting to go the way of newspapers. Newspapers are around, but he generation where they heavily influence policy and was the source of news is gone. I still like to enjoy the paper, but I venture I may be a rare case. Cable news will be going the same way and already is heading there. The people that cable news was profound for as a source of information and influence are going to dwindle over time.

> The more interesting part of this is, who has cable anymore?

Old people who watch FoxNews, apparently.

It's the most-watched cable channel, but it's only watched by a tiny fraction of the population. MSNBC and CNN also rank highly relative to cable channels (below Fox and ESPN and above HGTV) but are still very low in terms of overall viewership.

Kind of like Twitter, which has 37 million "monetizable daily active users" in the US, of which about half of them use Twitter daily. So that's something like 19 million users - high for a social network or web site, but still a tiny fraction of the population.

If CNN hangs on until the next election cycle, they'll be fine.

Enough Americans seem to be too politically brainwashed in election cycles and need emotional support when their side loses.

If some investors invest in both Fox and CNN, keep only a few key people permanently and hire others temporarily as they are needed (depending on which side the elections tip every 2 years), they will do much better.

The truth hurts. People prefer a warm blanket.

keep telling yourself that

That’s depressing as hell. “Entertainment” passing as news, catering to the lowest common denominator.

I would counter this by saying that Americans have never paid that much attention to hard news, especially political news.

What has changed is that news networks (primarily Fox and CNN) realized this and pivoted into entertainment without giving up their branding as "news".

Being upset about this is like being upset that people watch reality TV instead of documentaries. Yes, reality TV is theoretically "documentary" content, but it's not taking viewers away from Ken Burns.

All you gotta do is feed people's delusions and racism

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