That's not a political point. It's a simple fact.
FoxNews is a talk channel. Increasingly its so-called rivals in so-called cable "news" are also running talk channels.
When CNN Headline News has on Nancy Grace or Glenn Beck, they're not doing news, they're doing talk. The same thing happens when MSNBC has on Tucker Carlson, or when CNN shows Larry King. When Wolf Blitzer throws to Andrea Koppel in the Capitol, that's news. When he stands around the table with Carville and J.C. Watts, that's talk.
Talk is not news. Talk is talk. Talk is not subject to news judgment. It's subject to ratings judgment. And financial judgment. People who host talk shows are talent. People who do news are journalists. Fox hires talent.
The innovation FoxNews brought to cable was to replace news with talk across the board. They got higher ratings, made more money, but lowered their costs.
Regardless of your politics, you can check this out for yourself by
doing what is called a "content analysis," a basic exercise of the
journalistic art.
You download a full day of the product. You measure the amount of news they do -- covering stories, people in the field, talking heads reading headlines. You measure the amount of talk they do -- people chatting in a studio. You should also measure the amount of advertising they run, and the amount of "house advertising" (advertising for themselves) they run. (I know, the image to the left is from a liberal attack on Fox.)
What you will find is that FoxNews is at least 80% talk. Fox&Friends is talk. Hannity&Colmes is talk. Bill O'Reilly is talk. It doesn't matter, for purposes of this exercise, what they're talking about, or what they are saying. The fact is they're talking. They are sitting in a studio and they are talking. (The Today Show, and its imitators, are also, mostly, talk.)
When you do the same content analysis regarding CNN and MSNBC you're also going
to find a lot of talk. But you're also going to find a lot of news.
CNN, during the day, is mostly news. MSNBC, during the day, is mostly
talk, although they do throw to news that's standing still --
courtrooms, car chases (which are covered by someone else so they're
standing still for MSNBC), news conferences. Keith Olbermann is doing
news-talk -- each segment he does offers both. It's also heavily scripted
(unlike most of Fox) so it costs more than plain talk. (Parts of O'Reilly's show are also scripted. Scripts take planning, and cost money. Talk is cheap.)
Again this is not about politics. This is about costs. This is a business story. Talk costs less
than news, a lot less. And talk can draw better ratings than news, a
lot better. The Fox innovation was to practically eliminate news (which
costs money) in favor of talk (which doesn't).
So why is anyone, no matter their politics, treating FoxNews as a "News" channel?
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