FOX NEWS LEAVES ITS RIVALS IN THE DUST: There’s a stunning gap in the ratings between the Fox News Channel and its nearest competitors. Ed Bark of The Dallas Morning News writes:
It’s really no contest anymore — not the race among the Democratic presidential candidates but the battle for cable news ratings supremacy.
Fox News Channel continues to crush CNN and MSNBC in the political season. The latest available Nielsen Media Research numbers, for the week of Jan. 19-25, show the “Fair and Balanced” network averaging 1.8 million viewers in prime time to rank seventh among all cable networks.
CNN had 906,000 viewers during the same period and MSNBC just 363,000.
The week included the Iowa caucuses and President Bush’s State of the Union address, both of which received substantial attention on all three cable news networks. CNN must be wondering what hit it after making another major investment in political coverage. The granddaddy of cable news has fallen and can’t seem to get up. Fox’s recent hiring of respected Chris Wallace from ABC News is another blow.
Bark quotes Wolf Blitzer of CNN as saying, “If you’re distorting, or if you’re tilting towards one side, believe me, that will come through very, very quickly. And you’ll be slapped very quickly, as you should be.”
Maybe this is what Blitzer was referring to.
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