“Fox News” and “CNN” .. Why don’t you need calzone and lemon?!

“Fox News” and “CNN” .. Why don’t you need calzone and lemon?!

The dismissals of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and Don Lemon from CNN confirmed a belief that has bothered me for years, that we have the wrong idea about cable news. Friday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”), which turned out to be his last episode, attracted only 2.6 million viewers, or 1 percent of the American adult population. But on Monday, the news of his sacking was one of the most prominent news stories in the country. The strength of cable news lies in its reach and frequency, not in its ratings.
I discovered this during my nearly nine years at CNN, when I was a host of a weekly program on the media, devoting reports to Carlson’s militancy. The people who watched his eight o’clock show were only a small group of his total audience. But when you factor in all the people who watched him on TV in a coffee shop or airport, and all the people who watched a video of him online or listened to radio talk show hosts quote him, you get that he had a monthly audience of tens of millions. .
Now if you take that spread and multiply the dozens of other Fox News anchors, you might begin to understand the true impact of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Viewer ratings company Nielsen has a little-known metric for this called “cumulative viewership rate.” By this metric, Fox News attracted more than 63 million viewers during the first three months of this year. But Fox News executives downplayed its importance, perhaps because the number is larger for CNN, as it approached 68 million in the first quarter. However, these metrics do not fully explain the entire digital diffusion of stars like Carlson and Lemmon.
This is why I reject the popular prediction (even on some of these networks) that cable news is doomed to lose its appeal. For example, CNN has seen declines recently, but it still expects to make profits of $900 million this year. This is while it is expected that the “Fox News” channel will achieve twice that. It’s true that the endless sea of ​​content streaming online presents stiff competition, but as long as there are 20 or 30 ‘peak’ days a year that make people want to grab the remote and watch a live news event, cable news will be there for them.
Television networks may be more influential than ever, but they are certainly more polarizing. CNN and Fox News make money in the same way, mainly through subscription fees and ad sales, and are often side by side on the same cable channel lists. Although both Carlson and Lemon were fired amid accusations of fueling a hostile work environment, the two anchors were operating in very different media worlds. Fox News, though it has a newsroom staffed by reporters and editors, is mainly a conservative entertainment operation and a Republican party organ. The news in this channel does not come first, not even second, and its journalists know that. By contrast, CNN, though it makes some attempts to be entertaining, is mainly a newsgathering engine, and has correspondents and bureaus around the world that it maintains at a high price.
This difference has very significant implications. Lemon’s popularity, for example, made him a celebrity. As for the spread of Carlson, it made him an unelected leader of the Republican Party, but rather someone who had to appease the Speaker of the House, Republican Kevin McCarthy, to appease him. How not when a whole system of far-right sites and social networks was eagerly waiting to promote Carlson’s episodes every night! That power cannot be measured, but it is the way to understand the power and influence of cable news.
This week confirmed two things: the power of cable news, and the fact that the networks, not the stars, control it.
Carlson, according to my reports and those of others, believed his viewership ratings made him invincible. In fact, millions of people believed what he said. But earthly gravity reaffirmed itself. And their dismissals show that there are limits, even to the extremes of cable news, and that, for all the things the new media environment may have changed in the world, one of those limits is the same as the one you might encounter in your job: that if you become a big nuisance Enough of your bosses, you’ll eventually get fired.
But the cable series continues, because the audience insists on it. As word of Carlson’s departure spread on Monday, viewership ratings soared for a much smaller right-wing channel, Newsmax, which is aiming to become the next Fox News. Within a few hours, Newsmax had more than tripled the usual audience for its pro-GOP talk show. So the next battle in the cable news wars is just beginning.

Brian Shelter

American writer and journalist

Published by special arrangement with The New York Times Service.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/opinion/tucker-carlson-fox-don-lemon-cnn.html