Something you may not be aware of about cable tv news.

You may be aware that not long ago GE sold 51% of NBC Universal (the company which owns and operates MSNBC) to the giant cable tv corporation Comcast Cable.
What you may not have heard is that this past week GE sold the remaining 49% to them too. So now Comcast owns MSNBC outright. It no longer has to even be in consultation with it's partner owner.

Even though MSNBC has lagged in the ratings competition with Fox News for ten years, GE never interfered with the liberal content on MSNBC. That was mainly because GE has a history of being in bed with liberal politics and liberal politicians. The company found it lucrative for them to do so.

BUT, we don't know what the politics of Comcast Cable is. And if Comcast has no allegiance to the liberal programming on MSNBC, they may be only interested in getting the ratings up so they can increase their revenues.
If that turns out to be the case, they could easily do a total revamp of the programming in effort to emulate the ratings success of Fox News.
In other words, of the three cable news operations, you could then see what amounts to two of the three be versions of Fox News.
Or if the insiders at MSNBC are aware that their bosses at Comcast are not happy with the ratings, that could influence the MSNBC management to start to mellow out on the content themselves (make it less liberal).

Stay tuned.

Wouldnt it be nice if they just shocked the crap out of everybody and took a independant stance on everything. No talking heads, just people telling the news with out any of thier personal opinions in it all.

Chrissy wrote:Wouldnt it be nice if they just shocked the crap out of everybody and took a independant stance on everything. No talking heads, just people telling the news with out any of thier personal opinions in it all.

That would definitely be a shock. But for a different reason than you might think.
The cable TV audience is now so used to being fed pro wrestling disguised as "news" programming, that I'm not sure they even know what "journalism" is anymore and would probably just be bored with it and tune out.
It's now been a long time since the television networks first discovered the way to increase ratings was to combine the methods of their entertainment divisions with their news programming. And over time that has worked so well for them that it would really be shocking to see them toy with the success of that. So I wouldn't count on that happening.

http://www.politicususa.com/fox-news-ratings-drop-2012.html

"While CNN and MSNBC both saw their ratings grow in 2011, Fox News saw their ratings drop by 3% for the second straight year.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Project For Excellence in Journalism’s The State of the News Media 2012 report, viewership for all cable news was up 1% in daytime and 1% in primetime. CNN saw their ratings rise by 16%. Despite the loss of Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s prime time audience grew by 3%. The network’s daytime audience was up 20%. The ratings surge at CNN was a temporary blip caused by the tsunami in Japan and the Arab Spring. Without breaking news, CNN sinks to third place.

Fox News continues to lose viewers, but remains highly profitable. How can a network lose viewers, but increase profits? The answer is that Fox News demands the highest licensing fee from carriers in all of cable news. All subscribers pay an additional seventy eight cents a month to have Fox News carried on their system. This was an 11% increase in 2011 and one of the main reasons why Fox News can lose viewers, but set a record for profits.

Even if you never watch Fox News, as long as it is carried by your cable or satellite system, you are still adding to Rupert Murdoch’s fortune. If people really want to stop Fox News, they need to be pushing Congress to pass a la cart legislation that will allow viewers to pick and choose the networks that they want to pay for instead of being forced to subsidize channels that they can’t stand.

There are three warning signs on the road ahead for Fox News. It is likely that Fox News will continue to lose viewers in the future because they have the oldest audience on television. The average age of a Fox News viewer is 65 years old. Younger people aren’t replacing the older viewers that the network is losing on a yearly basis, which means that if things stay as they are, the network is fighting a losing battle against Father Time..."

Fox news' ratings dropped by 3% and MSNBC ratings increased 3%.

In in light of what I'm going to show you below, that change is about as significant as me losing one more hair on my head vs the guy who sees one more hair sprout out on the top of his head. I'm still bald and he still has a full head of hair. Same as the comparison between us before the "change".

Now about this part...

The average age of a Fox News viewer is 65 years old. Younger people aren’t replacing the older viewers that the network is losing on a yearly basis, which means that if things stay as they are, the network is fighting a losing battle against Father Time..."

Here's the deal, florida texan. These are the current ratings. And the version the industry refers to as the "advertising demo" ratings.
These ratings measure the size of the audience who are between 25-54 years old. That is the audience who advertisers most covet because that age group are the biggest consumers of advertised products.
Click on this link and look over it...

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/category/ratings

What you see is that both in the daytime and in primetime, Fox News has twice as many viewers as MSNBC. And remember, that's twice as many between 25 and 54 (the ones that matter money-wise).

I've been following this for years. And Fox News Channel has maintained this lead for as long as I've been monitoring it. And continues to as of right now.

You really can't appreciate this without comparing it to other categories of television programming. It's unusual for a given competitor to dominate the ratings to this degree for more than a decade in any category of television programming.

The information in the article you shared with us is misleading. What that article was doing is called "spin". It's using insignificant factoids to attempt to convince you of something which is not valid (a method no doubt learned from watching cable news). lol

I can't remember her ever using msnbc or cnn for her info... it's always much further left than just standard liberal bias.

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."