Will election affect Fox News’ dominance?

Fox News Channel celebrated its 12th anniversary on the air this month in the same fashion that it has celebrated each of the previous five anniversaries, with a decided edge in total viewers over CNN and MSNBC.

Campaign upheaval, economic calamity and the occasional natural disaster boosted Fox’s average prime-time audience during the quarter to 2.1 million viewers, leading CNN at 1.3 million and MSNBC at 875,000. It trailed only ESPN, bolstered by Monday Night Football, in prime time during September among basic cable channels, and it more than doubled its prime time audience in the 25-54 demographic from September 2007.

Each of these milestones, as with the rest of Fox’s litany of ratings success since 2002, has come when a Republican administration, albeit an increasingly unpopular one, has been in the White House. That begs the question: Can Fox News continue to enjoy the same degree of success it has experienced the past six-plus years should Barack Obama win the White House on Election Day?

Confidence is high at News Corp. headquarters in midtown New York, where Jay Wallace, the network’s vice president of news editorial, sees Fox News’ signature moments as driven by events, not ideology.

“We’ve had five or six watershed moments, and not all of them have been the administration. They’ve been events,” Wallace said.

“The first was Clinton-Lewinsky in 1998, then Bush-Gore in 2000. After that, 9/11 was the moment when you could see that viewership was changing away from CNN being the only kid on the block.

“Then came the Iraq War and then Hurricane Katrina, and now we seem to be, with this current news cycle of politics and the economy, in another one of those moments that will be part of what defines us as a channel.”

Wallace, who is in charge of news content outside Fox’s morning show and its prime-time lineup featuring Bill O’Reilly, Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren, said new methods of distribution could play a critical role in sustaining the network into its teen years.

In that vein, he noted, Fox has created a YouTube channel and incorporates its on-air talent not only on the air but on its Web site as part of a political channel called “Strategy Room” that airs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

By asking anchors to multitask between video and online, Fox News is working in the same territory as ESPN, which incorporates its cable platforms and its Internet site to capture viewers as they move from TV to computer and back again, and reconfiguring each platform as viewing habits change.

Bill Hemmer, the former CNN anchor who joined Fox News in 2005, thinks the improbable nature of the two presidential candidates ensures that the current boom in ratings for the cable news channels will continue into 2009.

“We will either elect our first African-American president or a man who spent years in a prison camp. Find a better storyline,” Hemmer said.

“Regardless of what happens on Election Day, the issues on the line in January will be just as important as they were when we debated them in the election cycle.”

If Fox is impacted by the regime change, it could become most apparent in its prime-time lineup, where Fox’s three nighttime opinion shows continue to hold down the top three spots among cable news shows for total viewers and adults 25-54, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes still have a comfortable lead in that race, but MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 are closing the gap for third in the 25-54 demo with Van Susteren’s On the Record and, on occasion, will win a night against the Fox lineup.

“(Fox) will continue to succeed as long as they provide a lineup of people that their audience likes to watch whether or not there’s breaking news,” said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

“CNN gets big spikes (for major stories), but Fox has managed to gather a core audience that will still watch them even when there’s no breaking news and Hannity and Colmes or Bill O’Reilly are reporting on firemen rescuing cats and giving presents to the liberal cats before they rescue the conservative cats.”

Thompson and others, in fact, say Fox’s core audience could be energized by a Democrat in the White House in the same fashion that radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh rose to prominence during the Clinton administration.

Network officials, by the way, fume at the notion that Fox programming skews harder in one ideological direction than its counterparts venture in other directions.

A report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press said 39 percent of regular Fox News viewers surveyed consider themselves Republicans; 51 percent of regular CNN viewers, by comparison, identified themselves as Democrats.

Hemmer says Fox’s success will continue to hinge on better use of resources and efforts to differentiate itself from its competitors.

“We have to do more work with less people, which forces us to work smarter and to find the stories and focus you won’t find anywhere else,” he said.

“Our chairman (Roger Ailes) says that if we put on the same product as someone else, why would anybody choose to watch us?”

– By DAVID BARRON
david.barron@chron.com

Popularity: 1% [?]

To answer the title of your story: No. The crazies are always going to be out there & if Obama wins, you can be sure that a lot of closeted bigotry is going to come out front & center. Who better to give them a voice & meaning than FauxNews.

I watch Fox for very simple reasons. It has more intriguing, relevant content than CNN or MSNBC and its on-air personalities are way more engaging. (Although I do find Chris Matthews entertaining.)