During his speech about the debt ceiling on Tuesday, which I was not able to hear in its entirety, President Obama said something curious. He criticized Republican lawmakers of grandstanding on the debt issue so they could get on “cable news”.
You don’t have to be a Washington insider to know that “cable news” was a generality by which he meant “Fox News”. The president is apparently still irked by free speech and the fact that people have the temerity to disagree with him on policy.
This reminded me that I have long been perplexed by the Democrats’ ironic dislike of democracy. If Obama was a true populist, he would be praising Fox News, and I’m sure the newshounds there would be glad to interview him early and often. The reason Fox News is a halcyon of democracy, besides being part of the Fourth Estate and asking “Fair and Balanced” questions of politicians from both sides of the aisle, is that Fox News is preferred by more people in this country than any other channel.
And I don’t just mean among the cable news channels; I mean among ALL cable channels.
In the week just past, June 20-26 (article), Fox News was rated number eight among all cable channels in total number of viewers. That’s pretty good, but it’s even better when you realize that five of the top seven were children’s networks (the kids are obviously watching too much TV!)
For adult programming, only USA and TNT beat Fox News. Fox’s nearest rival, Headline News, was No. 18. But this also means that Fox was ahead of History (9), A&E (10), ESPN (14), Discovery (19) and the Food Channel (21).
I can respect President Obama’s preference for his own ideology and I wouldn’t pretend that Fox’s opinion programming doesn’t tilt right, but shouldn’t he realize that being critical of, not just the most popular news channel but one of the most popular cable channels period, wouldn’t be good for his own popularity?
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