Channelling
Perusing my Wall Street Journal online this morning, this item struck me:
Fox News Channel Wants $1 Per Customer Anniversary Gift
It seems that Fox News only gets about $.35 per customer from cable and satellite companies, while CNN gets $.50, MSNBC $.35 and ESPN gets $2.60. This, even though Fox nets 1.5 million viewers each night to CNN’s 700,000 and MSNBC’s 350,000, so they might have a point.
Fox News’s situation is a far cry from a decade ago, when the channel took the then-remarkable step of paying cable operators $10 per subscriber to launch it. Once that distribution was secured, the channel’s programming did the rest: Before long, the fees were flowing the other way…
…Fox News is banking that it is now one of the handful of channels which can play hardball with cable and satellite operators if negotiations stall. Like Viacom, Inc.’s Nickelodeon and Disney’s ESPN, Fox News has rabid fans who would howl if it wasn’t part of their basic cable package. Its mix of news and talk has struck a chord with conservative viewers.
“They definitely have leverage,” says Jimmy Schaeffler, an analyst with the Carmel Group, an industry consulting firm. He expects the network to play up “all those wealthy Republicans living in the nice neighborhoods….watching its shows.”
I never (ever) watch Fox News (or CNN or MSNBC, for that matter), and I’d probably feel more than a little outrage if my cable rates went up in order to triple Bill O’Reilly’s salary. But I wouldn’t have much choice - as stated above, Fox News is part of the “basic” cable package. You know what, though? I’ll bet the Fox guys are all in favor of giving the President the line-item veto to pick through legislation and only sign the parts that fit with his agenda. So, would they support me if I insisted on being able to scratch Fox News from my “basic” package and save the buck (plus the taxes, fees and local politician kick-back charges that attach to it)?
One has doubts. Especially since
No cable or satellite operator wants to be without a must-have channel that its rival is carrying when the phone companies might be more willing to pony up to break into the market. And satellite purveyor DirecTV likely will cough up, too: News Corp. owns it.
The fix, it seems, is in.
