Fair and Balanced not looking as Fair and Balanced

Fox News in Ratings Free Fall

Here's something you won't hear on Fox News -- ratings for the cable news channel have been plummeting since before the November election.

According to TV Newser, the number of people watching Fox during prime time in the 25 to 54 age bracket dropped in April for the sixth straight month.

TV Newser cited a CNN press release which gave these totals for Fox's primetime audience in the 25 to 54 age bracket: Oct. 04: 1,074,000; Nov. 04: 891,000; Dec. 04: 568,000; Jan. 05: 564,000; Feb. 05: 520,000; March 05: 498,000; April 05: 445,000. That amounts to a decline of 58 percent, with no sign of leveling off.

Other cable stations' ratings were also down since the election, but CNN's, for example, appeared to have stabilized last month while Fox's continued to drop.

What the press release didn't say is that we can add 629,000 people to those who don't watch Fox. That works out to just over 89,857 people for each of the seven News Hounds who are watching Fox so those people don't have to.

Now that we've added another Hound, we should be able to take care of the remaining 445,000 in even less than six months.

Fox's plunging ratings should be a warning to those cable stations trying to copy the news channel's conservative Republican slant. People are tired of it. Try something different, like a progressive television show, for a change.

Part of the drop off can be accounted for by the end of election politics; all the networks dropped off in November and those of us with blogs saw a decline in readers. The other networks stabilized a couple of months ago and many of us have seen our blog traffic increase over the last two months back to or even above pre-election levels. I think all you have to do is look at the polls to see the problem FOX has. They are still preaching to the choir but the choir is getting smaller. They continue to hype the Iraq war but the polls show people aren't buying it anymore. They took a militant stand on the Terri Schiavo issue and a vast majority disagreed.