The Future of Cable News

Five years ago I observed that “FoxNews founder, Rupert Murdoch and his sons, fired Roger Ailes, Bill Shine, Bill O’Reilly, Bob Beckel, Jeffrey Lord, and suspended Eric Bolling. All this is in keeping with what appears to be an effort to remake Fox News into a general interest cable television channel.”

Today “The Five” features Geraldo Rivera and Jessica Tarlov and there are no signs that Fox management will move away from striving to achieve “balance.” Once we believed Fox would serve a role in combating Progressive domination of cable news at CNN and MSNBC.

In retrospect, why would Fox consider anything other than ”business” in managing what Fox self-describes as “among the most recognized and influential media companies in the world”?

If a person or company takes the short term view, of course, there is nothing to be concerned about “Progressive” domination of the administrative State, news media, higher education, Protestant religious denominations and the Catholic Church.

But in the long term murmurs of discontent today can become ferocious moods that lead to destruction of all that “business” leaders take for granted. That occurred in the 1860’s when a heightened sense of justice allowed no compromise and led to Civil War. We live with the consequences of that fratricide even today.

For that reason, we should not ignore signs that a large portion of American citizens—21 million suggested by one opinion survey—support the January 6 “insurrection.” Ignore them and CNN, MSNBC and Fox will be overtaken by “NewsMax” or some other more attentive media news entity.