I am sure Eric will appreciate this story. There are few jobs with warmer hot seats that an on-air broadcast personality. The on-air talent sells his trust, and the company sells advertising. Lose the trust, lose the advertising.
Fox has lost the trust of patriotic Americans and is losing audience, look who is gaining, from Red State [1]:
Well, this is unexpected. While I knew Fox News was losing viewers (at least during the times when Tucker Carlson and the rest of the prime time lineup aren’t saving them), I didn’t expect a competing, right-leaning network to do this well, this soon against the conservative news giant.
Newsmax broke 1 million viewers for the first time ever. ‘Greg Kelly Reports’ was the happy recipient of what appears to be a wave of Republican viewers changing the channel.
Fox News gained fifty percent market share when it was a dependable patriotic news source. That share is up for grabs. If a playboy like Ted Turner can make his cable news, I am sure that a businessman, say Donald J. Trump (Sr. or Jr.) can as well. The magazines are full of ordinance read to fire.
Addendum: (Eric)
I was wondering which way that particular race was going to go. I am reminded of a somewhat less critical battle between AM radio stations back in the middle 70s, here in the Rochester area, between WBBF and WAXC, the two top 40 stations in town at that time.
WBBF was a little 1,000 w station that for almost a decade have been kicking butt on the rest of the market, all but one of which had larger coverage.
Along came WAXC, who decided they were going to challenge the hold that BBF had on the market. It took them a few years but they eventually did it period when they did the owners decided okay I’ve had enough and they sold it to a new owner who immediately changed the format and the call sign of the station. Completely different feel, completely different music, and their audience basically disappeared overnight. The new call was WWWG, which, the local pundits labeled “what went wrong guys?”
I’d like to say that’s all this is with Fox news. Even though the majority of it fits, there is a political angle to all of this that cannot be ignored… And the repercussions of it are going to be large.