Rupert Murdoch’s thick heads at Fox News are starting to cost him money.
Fox News is the best-performing part of Murdoch’s News Corp at the moment, with high ratings, revenues and profits. Fox is making money attacking the Obama Administration (along with America’s Alan Jones, Rush Limbaugh, a shock jock radio host out of New York who is as thick as he sounds).
Glenn Beck is the closest Fox equivalent to Limbaugh with an times strident, virulent form of right-wing rubbish so beloved this days by Murdoch and the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes.
But now Murdoch is finding that he and Fox no longer carry the clout people used to think.
Beck’s strident personal attacks on President Obama (he accused the President of being a racist) and his wackjob policies are starting to cost money.
Some of America’s biggest advertisers have started boycotting the Glenn Beck Show which is one of Fox News’ biggest names and attracts around 2 million people a night.
US media reports say Procter and Gamble, the biggest advertiser in America, Geico, the nation’s second largest car insurer (owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway) and several other major spenders have pulled their ads from the show and from Fox.
Fox claims some of the ads have gone elsewhere and that other advertisers have stepped in, but from US reports none have the spending budget of P&G and Geico.
The moves by advertisers was reported on the MarketWatch website that’s owned by News Corp through the Dow Jones Company.
The irony here is that conservative groups that oppose gay marriage, abortion, sex education and other right-wing driven social issues, have long pressured media companies and their advertisers to rein in or remove programs or personalities who may be seen promoting “liberal” ideas.
Murdoch is feeling the heat and his opposite number at General Electric, Jeff Immelt, have done a deal to try and stop the strident attacks their respective cable news networks have been launching against each other over the past two years.
Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Bill O’Reilly on Fox News have been, until now, the main offenders.
Glenn,
The story about management stepping in and ‘stopping the feud’ between Olbermann and O’Rielly is bogus. Olbermann has publically stated that he was approached by no-one and if he had been he would have told them where to get off.
Actually, I understand that sponsors are NOT leaving the network – merely the Beck show. So Fox is not losing anything, but IS getting “we won’t buckle to blackmail” cred.
I cant believe there a 2 million people stupid enough to watch FOX,its on a par with the Comedy channel,only the Comedy channel is more intelligent
caught between a market and a hard place
How wonderful to think that, just possibly, the Raving Right will founder on the rocks they’ve strewn in the last twenty years. Hoist on their own petard, which until relatively recently breached many a wall of intelligent consesus. When the lowest of the low rats, big corporate advertisers abandon your flagship, you are the Hesperis, except that no-one cares.