Summary: After nearly a decade of
spectacular ratings, Fox News' ratings have been declining for more than a year.
Slumping Fox News Celebrating 1st Decade
By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer
October 1, 2006, 8:18 PM EDT
NEW YORK -- 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.
Maybe some of this was on Fox News chief Roger Ailes' mind one day last week
when he rode the elevator to the 22nd floor of News Corp.'s office tower for an
8:45 a.m. stroll through the network's ad sales department.
Mr. Ailes? What are you doing up here, someone wondered aloud.
"Taking attendance," the hard-charging motivator replied.
Message delivered.
Loved by some, loathed by others, Fox News Channel has been the biggest success
in the cable industry and profoundly changed television news since its signal
turned on Oct. 7, 1996.
Ailes can still remember a reporter's laughter during the news conference to
introduce the network. He had the last laugh: Fox News beat by a year his plan
for overtaking CNN and grew to more than double its rivals in viewership. It
made stars of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and put "fair and balanced" into
news history textbooks.
Opinionated talk is now a staple on the TV dial, with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC,
Lou Dobbs on CNN and Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News. Fox was first.
"I watched CNN for a week before I went on and I kept trying to wake myself up,"
Ailes told The Associated Press. "I kept nodding off and I realized they are
biased, they are boring, they looked like a network that has never had any
competition."
Ailes, a former Republican political operative, said simply presenting different
points of view made Fox seem like a contrast to left-leaning news coverage
elsewhere.
Before Fox, many in the media scoffed at the notion of a liberal bias and
figured only a handful of people really believed that, said Erik Sorenson,
former MSNBC president.
"Fox proved it's a much larger group than anybody realized," he said.
Their success clearly made others respond. The very idea that Rush Limbaugh
would appear on a "CBS Evening News" segment called "Free Speech," heavily
promoted on Katie Couric's first night as anchor, would have been unfathomable a
decade ago, Sorenson said.
"I've had many people say to me we have forced people to think differently in
their own newsrooms," Ailes said.
Fox's critics consider "fair and balanced" camouflage for an agenda. Whatever
the truth, news-watching became increasingly partisan: more Democrats watched
CNN, more Republicans watched Fox, according to a 2004 study by the Pew Research
Center for the People in the Press. The year Fox started, CNN had more
Republican viewers than Democrats.
While he cautioned not to overexaggerate Fox's influence, former CBS News
President Andrew Heyward suggested industry sensitivity to Fox's popularity,
coupled with shock after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, combined to dampen
aggressiveness in questioning the government's assumptions leading up to the
Iraq war.
Ailes dismissed that theory with an epithet.
Less attention has been paid to the look of Fox News. During its peak, it
appeared more colorful, more graphically innovative and more urgent. It made CNN
look stodgy.
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."
The timing is inopportune, since Fox is about to negotiate new fees with cable
and satellite providers to replace contracts agreed to when the network first
started. As a startup, Fox accepted low fees from cable providers and believes
its success made those deals a bargain. Now Fox wants them to pay up, and in
some cases is asking providers to quadruple their payments.
Theories abound on the ratings decline, and include simple rules of gravity:
Ratings can't go up forever.
Some believe there's a correlation to the declining popularity of President Bush
and concern about the Iraq war. "The rah-rah enthusiasm that was there in 2002,
four years later has dissipated," Sorenson said.
Some of the bigger stories of the past year, such as Hurricane Katrina and the
wars in the Middle East, played better to the newsgathering strengths of CNN,
Heyward said.
Olbermann's growing popularity -- and growing partisanship -- along with the
response to Clinton's "Fox News Sunday" interview also indicate that Fox's foes
have less fear about taking the network on.
Fox has recently made a handful of lineup changes -- most notably yanking E.D.
Hill from the popular "Fox & Friends" and giving her a daytime anchor slot,
replacing her on the morning show with Gretchen Carlson. Ailes said FNC is
trying to add some fresh faces to its contributors.
Ailes is also up to old motivational tricks, including calling the occasional 5
a.m. meeting ("I think it's useful to wake people up and remind them of how they
get their paycheck," he said). A large trade publication ad placed recently
saying the network was looking for aggressive new producers was seen -- for good
reason -- as being directed as much internally as at job seekers.
Despite the slump, Ailes is quick to point out that Fox News still consistently
beats all competitors throughout the day and evening.
"I have to be careful because I'm never satisfied unless we're going upward," he
said. "But the truth is, I wouldn't change places with anybody else and they
would change places with me in a heartbeat. For all the attacks we get, do you
think MSNBC or CNN wouldn't want to be where we are?"
When he gets up everyday, "I don't want to be where they are," he said. "I don't
want to be sucking canal water every morning thinking, `what am I going to do
today to make things better?' You have to keep it in perspective, which I try to
do."