Liberal Talk Radio

The NYT reports on CNN prez Jon Klein’s latest attempts to go toe-to-toe with Fox. But the devil is in the details:

That gap in average viewing time has had a profound impact on CNN’s ratings: thus far this season, its average audience between 7 and 11 p.m. (775,000) is far less than Fox’s during the same time period (two million) , according to Nielsen Media Research. (As recently as four years ago, CNN was drawing more viewers than Fox News at night.)

The truth, of course, is that Fox and CNN aren’t even truly competitors. The reason Fox kicks CNN’s butt is that Fox is an extension of a very successful right-wing media empire, and guys like Hannity and O’Reilly have successul publishing and talk-radio offshoots. They’re multi-media savvy. It’s a synergy that the behemoth of AOL-CNN-Time-Warner, stunningly, has failed to equal.

This is especially (perhaps mostly) true in the 7-11 primetime hours that the article focuses on. Calling Fox a “news” station between those hours would be like calling Michael Moore a “journalist.”

Can you imagine Aaron Brown or Lou Dobbs ever getting the kind of rabid fan base that the Fox guys (and Moore) enjoy? Would never happen. Extremists get people excited. Moderates don’t (except maybe here at B&P!). So Klein’s got a tough sell when he says this:

Mr. Klein has ruled out one obvious option: he will not, he says, turn CNN’s prime-time lineup into a liberal counterpunch to Fox’s opinion-driven programming, which draws a heavily conservative audience. “It’s much better to be right down the middle,” Mr. Klein said in an interview. “Moderates are our sweet spot.”

It’s not that he can’t get people to watch moderate hosts, it’s just that his idea that he’ll get people to hang around as long as they do on Fox (26 minutes vs. CNN’s 19) is going to be hard if he intends to keep his hosts relatively neutral.

My broader point is that CNN and Fox aren’t really competitors, they just seem that way. Fox wants you to think they’re a competitor to CNN because it makes them look more legitimate and “fair and balanced.” They give their shows a CNN-like aura, but it’s only skin deep. Look at the “Beltway Boys,” for example, which is a lot like CNN’s Crossfire, at least at first glance. But whereas Crossfire has a liberal and conservative host going at it, Beltway Boys has two conservatives yapping at each other. It’s a sleight of hand. And it’s furthered by the fact that most cable and satellite providers choose to lump CNN, MSNBC, and FOX at the same end of the dial, thereby making them seem even more indistinguishable.

Bottom line? The TV market for right-wing propaganda is bigger than the market for 24-hour news. Plain and simple. I’m not placing a value judgement on that, it’s just how it is. Maybe that wasn’t true before the internet, but it’s true now. CNN’s ratings slide is, I’m guessing, due to the fact that there’s a substantial overlap between the “news junkie” audience and the “right-wingnut” audience, and the folks who fall into both categories have migrated to Fox, because it gives just enough news that they don’t miss CNN.

So what should CNN do? It’s got a hard sell ahead of itself if it wants to go against Fox. If it wants more popular appeal, it should probably do less politics and more pop culture. It can’t succeed as a Liberal counterweight, as some have argued, because liberals are a smaller market, and they don’t tend to spend as much time in front of the tube.

They should also work harder at multi-media celebrity anchors, exploiting the fact that they’re part of an enormous media empire (Anderson Cooper croons Sinatra???).

Oh yeah, and definitely ditch the xenophobic Lou Dobbs. He makes my skin crawl with his anti-immigrant, anti-globalization screeds. What a reactionary dolt! And not telegenic at all!!