With The Fox News Empire In A Ratings Slump, Where's Roger Ailes' Magic Touch?

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters For America:

As a TV pro, Roger Ailes is routinely praised in the press for his Midas touch. According to years of fawning coverage, Ailes has an uncanny ability to tap the programming pulse of the public. If that's true, now would be a good time for him to find his magic stroke because he just signed a contract reportedly worth more than $20 million annually, and two of his most important properties are flailing.

Fox's latest Nielsen numbers are bad. Really bad. Its worst in 12 years. And early indications are the slump may be part of a larger, systemic problem that could cause bigger headache as fast-climbing MSNBC continues to post gains.

President Obama's first term proved to be a ratings winner for Fox News as the channel gleefully projected the inner demons of the right wing and marketed itself as the final defender of freedom. Early 2013 indicators though, suggest that ratings cycle may be played out.

Question: Does Ailes the programming guru have a Plan B?

That's not the Fox chief's only problem. Ailes also runs Fox Business,  whose cable ratings remain anemic, and whose entire audience of 25-54 viewers can often fit inside a hockey arena, despite the fact Fox Business is available in 60 million homes coast to coast.

But that problem pales to the one looming at Fox News. According to Nielsen numbers, not only did MSNBC enjoy big gains in January, but for the Monday-Sunday primetime shows Fox logged its worst ratings since August 2001. (For Monday-Friday primetime, it was Fox's worst showing since May 2006.) Fox is still the most-watched cable news channel, but the margins are shrinking in a hurry, especially in the coveted 25-54 demo during primetime. (On The Record With Greta Van Susteren appears to be just weeks away from losing the 10 p.m. demo battle  to MSNBC's The Last Word.)

This gives you an idea of the January ratings winners and losers, via NewsCorpse.com:

I can hear the Fox defenders insisting the election season's over so of course cable news ratings drop off once the main event passes, right? Also, Obama won, so it's not surprising Fox's conservative viewers are tuning out for now.

Wrong and wrong.

MSNBC has been able to sustain the ratings growth it enjoyed during the campaign season when viewers flocked to programs for news and information. So why can't Fox sustain viewers? And if you go back to early 2009 when Obama was inaugurated, Fox News' ratings didn't decline in the wake of a Democratic victory like they are now. In 2009, its ratings went up. In fact, Fox News' first quarter ratings that year skyrocketed. (Sean Hannity's audience January 2009 grew 69 percent compared to January 2008.)

From a February 2009 industry report:

Two weeks into President Barack Obama's time in the White House, with a changed line-up to go with the change on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Fox News Channel is posting stronger ratings than during the end of George W. Bush's time in office.

Four years ago, Obama's presidency translated into ratings gold for Fox News, aided in part by the arrival of Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and Fox's full-on embrace of the fringe. Four years later though, that passion seems to have been replaced by indifference.

Or maybe the ratings drop-off stems from hard feelings. Maybe tuned-out Fox viewers feel like they were duped on Election Night. Led by the channel to believe the country suffered a severe case of buyers remorse and would vote Obama office at the first possible opportunity, Fox faithful were forced not only to watch the Democrat post an another election victory, but do it with ease. In other words, almost nothing Fox News had told its aging viewers about the state of the campaign, or about the state of the country, was accurate.

It's true that Fox viewers have rarely held the channel accountable for the bedrock of information that its programming is built on. (Don't people watch Fox in order to become misinformed?) But the elaborate election ruse may have been too much for some faithful to take. (Note that in 2008, Fox didn't bother pretending Sen. John McCain was going to win.) Any lingering resentment could explain why Fox just posted its worst primetime ratings since President George W. Bush's first summer in the White House.

As for struggling Fox Business, the channel simply continues to flounder. It's true that its ratings are upmodestly from last year. But when you're improving on dreadfully weak ratings, modest bumps don't mean much.

In 2011, when the channel was drawing just 10,000 25-54 viewers a source told AdWeek that when it launched in 2007, channel executives thought they'd be doing "a lot better than" that. Nearly a year and a half later, the story isn't much better: Fox Business' target demo audience has edged up to just 14,000 viewers.

And some of the rating for those Fox Business shows are just astounding, especially for the 25-54 demo.According to Nielsen, 16 of the 18 lowest rated shows in all of cable news belong to Fox Business, with several of them attracting fewer than 10,000 viewers aged 25-54.

Fox Business' sputtering performance six years after its launch raises doubts about Ailes' supposed programming magic. Will the looming slump at Fox News simply confirm it?

Why Beck Is Out At Fox: Poor Ratings And Paranoid Rants

By George Zornick

After weeks of rumors about poor ratings and increasing concern at Fox News headquarters over Beck’s apocalyptic ranting, it’s finally official — Glenn Beck is ending his daily show on Fox. An announcement posted on his website today, but then taken down without explanation, said:

Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News’ digital properties. Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year.[...]

Glenn Beck said: “I truly believe that America owes a lot to Roger Ailes and Fox News. I cannot repay Roger for the lessons I’ve learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership.”



The statement did not indicate an end date for the show.

Beck entered the year without one-third of his earlier audience. Only months into his show, advertisers began deserting his program, and pressure by liberal groupsresulted in a loss of nearly 300 advertisers during the course of his show.

Last month, Fox News officials told the New York Times anonymously that they were “contemplating life without Mr. Beck.” The Times also reported that “[m]any on the news side of Fox have wondered whether his chronic outrageousness — he suggested that the president has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people’— have made it difficult for Fox to hang onto its credibility as a news network.”

That seems like a reasonable concern. Just yesterday, here’s what Beck used his show to assert:

– Union leaders are communists, socialists, or revolutionaries who want destruction of “western way of life” [04/05/11]

– Maybe Obama decided to try suspects at Guantanamo to inflame the Islamic world [04/05/11]

– Obama is “merely a player” in a globalist, Islamist show [04/05/11]

– Showing images of Obama, SEIU, and others, Beck says he “would put a lot of these people in jail.” [04/05/11]

– Beck somehow linked 9/11 to Wisconsin election, budget cuts[04/05/11]

– Smeared students protesting in Wisconsin as Lenin’s “useful idiots”[04/05/11]

Beck’s rants earlier this year, in which he tried to connect uprisings in the Middle East to a rising Islamic takeover, abetted by liberal groups in the United States, evenprovoked the ire of fellow conservatives and Fox personalities like Bill Kristol, who characterized Beck’s rants as “fearfulness unworthy of Americans.”

Yesterday on his radio show, Beck foreshadowed this announcement by telling his listeners that if he left Fox News, “don’t you ever believe” that the liberal watchdog Media Matters “caused a victory.” Perhaps that’s true — only Glenn himself is to blame for creating a show so radically divorced from reality that even Fox News couldn’t handle it.

Radio Chain Dropping Beck Because His Rants Hurt Ratings

by Joe Strupp

A radio chain that dropped Glenn Beck from five of its stations since January did so, in part, because the show's content was hurting ratings, the company's president said Monday.

"He bounces around pretty radically, I think he confuses people, they're not sure where he is coming from," said Rick Buckley, president of Buckley Radio of Greenwich, Conn., who spoke with Media Matters. "It can change day to day, hour to hour. Consistency is, I think, the path to success in broadcasting, in radio for sure, whether it be music or talk. Glenn is sort of all over the park from time to time."

Buckley spoke just days after his company announced it would pull Beck's show from four stations in Connecticut. -- WDRC-AM, WWCO-AM, WSNG-AM, and WMMW-AM. Those stations simulcast programming and will no longer air Beck's morning show, replacing it with two local personalities.

"Some of his direction has changed over the last year and a half," Buckley said. "He is preaching a lot more than entertaining."

The move comes just months after WOR Radio, the chain's flagship station in New York, replaced Beck with a local host in January.

"In the last six months or so, he has tended to be more and more taking a religious point of view ... It didn't do well here in the east," Buckley said. "It has not gotten real traction. If you want a religious point of view, we've got plenty of religious stations. You can get it 24/7."

Buckley, whose father started the company in the 1950s, said Beck's show had changed and taken on more of a religious tone since his August 2010 rally in Washington, D.C.

"There is no question I think he had a big change after his Washington conclave. Something hit him down there. His show changed after that," Buckley said. "In its basic elements that he had been doing for a long, long time. He got much more into the doomsday and a lot more talking of the religious aspects of people's lives and stuff like that. For us in New York and in Hartford, we just felt that a local program would be better."

In recent months, Beck's show has frequently veered into apocalyptic religiosity.

Asked about the WOR change, Buckley said he had expected Beck's ratings to improve in that market, but they did not after two years on the air.

"WOR ... we gave it a two-year shot, it just didn't seem to get traction, it didn't get the traction we thought it would, especially with all the publicity and P.R. he's had, you'd have thought it would be a runaway. It was going the other way," Buckley said. "I don't know whether he is a little off the reservation in trying to prove his point for the masses ... the listening audience."

Citing the WOR ratings in New York, Buckley said: "They weren't down, but they weren't up. We'd thought they'd go up. The other talk station in New York, WABC, had gone through a lot of changes and you would have thought consistency would have helped [Beck]. We'd have thought we'd see some movement, but we didn't see anything."

Beck's show will remain on one Buckley station, KNZR-AM in Bakersfield, Calif. The company owns 17 stations in three states.