Why Netflix is Facing a Very Dark Future (and Not Because of the $7 Disney+ Price)

While on this blog we normally discuss how politics are affected by the business of media, today’s focus is the idea of content distribution. While that might not involve any political angle, it’s important to remember that content distribution is the basis for all media and how content distribution goes in the future, so too will go the major news and political outlets.

In early April, Disney finally announced the launch date for its long anticipated streaming service labeled “Disney+”. What made the biggest headlines from the event was the announcement that the Mouse House was going to offer the service for a shockingly low $7. That turned all attention to long-time streaming entertainment king Netflix and what kind of a blow the Disney announcement would be to them. The problem with this thinking is that the announcement that will impact Netflix the most negatively was not the Disney+ price, but the closing of the Disney deal in buying out the 21^st Century Fox Studios. That is the kind of deal which could put Netflix nearly out of business in a decade’s time.

Netflix has been king of the streaming services for the past 10 years or so for one simple reason: content

Netflix has been king of the streaming services for the past 10 years or so for one simple reason: content. Yes there has been other contenders to the crown with Hulu and Amazon Prime, and while those services have produced some very high quality programming from “The Night Manager” to “Ray Donovan” to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and even generated heavy internet buzz with the likes of “Good Omens,” Netflix is still thought of as the Q-Tip or Kleenex of the business. A product so recognized as the best, the brand gets confused for the service as a whole. You don’t stream and chill, you Netflix and chill.

Netflix likes to boast of its high end production ventures as of late, including the company’s first ever Oscar wins with Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma and critically acclaimed Coen Brother’s film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs being nominated for another three. It also became an internet sensation in the past year with Birdboxbeing seen by an announced 80 million viewers and launching a number of viral challenges across the social media spectrum.

Netflix’s domination of the streaming service actually comes from a much different form of content: binge-worthy shows the company doesn’t control

But the reality for Netflix’s domination of the streaming service actually comes from a much different form of content: binge-worthy shows the company doesn’t control. Shows like “Friends”, “Parks & Recreation”, and “The Office” have become staples to the Netflix line up for consumers looking for some comfort watching. It’s no different than tradition television where shows long out of production are still worth vast fortunes in syndication alone like “Seinfeld” or old reruns of still current shows like “The Big Bang Theory”. Since Netflix traditionally refuses to release numbers on how many viewers have watched certain programs (other than bragging about Birdbox’s success), it’s hard to exactly pinpoint the number of Netflix subscribers who are paying to stream just for those specific binge-worthy shows but if we look at the example of “Friends”, it’s not hard to see how it has Netflix shaken to the core.

Late in 2018, word began to spread that all 236 episodes of “Friends” was going to be taken off of Netflix come January 1, 2019. This set off a rage across social media and eventually lead Netflix into an agreement to extend Friends on its platform through all of 2019. Before anyone rips Netflix for being so stupid into getting rid of Friends, know it’s actually the other way around. It’s “Friends”, or to be more specific, Warner Brothers Studios who has the licensing rights, that will pull it. But still one more year of “Friends” is so valuable to Netflix that they are paying around $100 million to continue streaming it (up from nearly $30 million). Or nearly three times the production budget for Roma and Birdbox combined.

All 236 episodes of “Friends” will stream on Netflix in 2019 for around $100 million

Now that the Department of Justice has signed off on the AT&T deal to buy up Time Warner, the new mega-media company is already looking to launch a streaming service of their own with expectations for that to be around the end of 2019. This could be even more complicated for Netflix considering AT&T is also one of the largest internet service providers in America giving the planned new Warner Brothers streaming service a direct access to customers with its large library of shows and movies to fill up plenty of content void at the launch. It would also be most likely that 236 episodes of “Friends” will be a major tent pole in that launch. This all comes before the fate of net neutrality laws are known and could pummel Netflix even more (as covered here).

The largest cable and internet service provider in the United States? That’s Comcast which owns NBC Universal and it’s massive library of movies and shows, including “Seinfeld”, “The Office”, and “Parks & Recreation”. With Disney ready to launch, and Warner Brothers gearing up to start streaming services, it won’t be too much longer until Comcast/NBC Universal decides to get in the game.

80% of Netflix viewing was that of licensed content which is content Netflix is streaming but doesn’t own.

According to a 7Park Data study, in 2017 80% of Netflix viewing was that of licensed content which is content Netflix is streaming but doesn’t own. Add in that some of Netflix branded “originals” aren’t entirely Netflix created but are the only place to watch them within the United States. A lot of these originate with the BBC for shows like “Luther” or “Babylon Berlin” which was co-produced by ARD and Sky as the most expensive German show ever. While programs like that might still do good business with Netflix, they are not tied down to the company and can seek greener pastures if they wish to any of the new streaming services coming soon.

Even some of Netflix’s actually original produced shows come under fire when you realize some of their biggest hits for television-like scripted shows were “Jessica Jones”, “Daredevil”, and “Iron Fist”, all three of which are Marvel licensed characters which is owned by Disney which is starting its own streaming service. If any reincarnation of the characters or the shows are going to be made, it’s going to be done on Disney+ and not Netflix.

Disney+ streaming service is announced and set to launch on November 12, 2019

While Netflix will proudly display its artistic and visually stunning and expensive original programming, it’s entire empire was built on the foundations of other studios’ work. Now that those studios are starting to catch up and launch streaming services themselves, why should they let Netflix continue to profit off their work when they can keep the content in house and rake in the money themselves. Yes Netflix will still have some desired programming like the Emmy winning “House of Cards” and “Stranger Things”, but given a choice would a consumer take that pairing or a streaming service that includes every Disney movie, Star Wars movie, Indiana Jones movie, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the X-Men franchise (now under Disney fully with the 21^st Century Fox deal), as well as the entire television catalogue of ABC and 21^st Century Fox which includes all 30 seasons of the “Simpsons”? It seems like that is a no-brainer.

Disney+ has been stealing all the headlines for its price point at $7 with the launch, but the real demise for Netflix is just all the content that Disney+ can offer. When it comes right down to it, as long as the prices between the two companies are close enough (and the free market will determine where that number is), Disney will always win on the power of their offerings. So too will Warner Brothers. And NBC Universal. And CBS (which is starting to dabble in the streaming world with CBS All Access). For a company so synonymous with streaming content to your home, Netflix will have very little to offer after the production studios take back what’s theirs. It won’t be overnight, or even in the next few years, but the world of content distribution will pass them by. In the future world of media in the digital age, whoever has content is king. That works for news, sports, movies, or just plain old comfort binge watching.

Why the GOP’s Push to End Net Neutrality is a Major Blow to Conservative Media

Protesters in Washington D.C. speaking out for net neutrality (Karen Bleier – AFP/Getty Images)

On April 9th, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that a bill from the Democratic-lead House in restoring the Obama-era rules on net neutrality was “dead on arrival in the Senate.” A day earlier the White House had told Congress that President Donald Trump would veto the bill even if it were to get through both sides of the Hill. In a statement the White House claimed the House’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” bill would “return to the heavy-handed regulatory approach of the previous administration… (and stop) the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to investigate and take enforcement action against unfair, deceptive, or anti-competitive acts or practices committed by broadband providers.” The great irony in all of this push from the Republican Party for the FCC to put an end to Obama’s directive of net neutrality is that the biggest causality for news and information in all of this will be the GOP’s favorite sounding board: Fox News.

First dive into the basics. According to the Obama White House, Net Neutrality is the idea that internet providers treat all internet traffic equality. That means the biggest of sites like Netflix should have the same processing power and ease to reach as your aunt’s cousin’s nephew’s blog about cats. The biggest fear of the pro-net neutrality crowd is that if the Obama-era rules are taken away, it would allow the massive internet service provider (ISP) companies to limit speeds to web sites they don’t control and then charge higher rates to regain that speed and accessibility. So for Netflix, which takes massive data rates to use, ISP’s would slow down the site and offer more expensive packages to return it to the customer’s liking. In the meantime, the ISP’s themselves will offer easily accessible content of their own production for the cheaper rate, thus censoring what content customers online can see without being priced out. It takes away the freedom of information that has made the internet the greatest and worst thing that’s ever happened to humanity.

In a world without net neutrality, there’s nothing to stop Comcast from only offering its own content for a reasonable price…

The largest internet provider in the country by far is Comcast which is the ISP to over 110 million people across 40 states. In a world without net neutrality, there’s nothing to stop Comcast from only offering its own content for a reasonable price that customers are forced into a take-it-or-leave-it choice thanks to cable companies owning monopolies over municipalities for the cable wires. While Comcast might loose some revenue in people choosing to “leave it” not getting the content they want, they’ll make it back by sky rocketing numbers of hits to content they already own thus bringing in more ad sales to that content as sponsors like to put their messages in places that will be seen. That kind of double-dipping will do just fine for Comcast who won’t give a damn about content produced by anyone else.

So what kind of content would Comcast put up on it’s more accessible internet option? For news, Comcast would have all the financial reasons in the world to slow down anything Fox News and instead off its customers the speedy information from MSNBC which is owned by NBC Universal which is in turn owned by Comcast. One of the next largest ISP in America? That would be AT&T that reaches into 20 states and which just recently acquired the assets of Time Warner and its news based content with CNN. Meanwhile the Fox News Channel’s parent company 21st Century Fox, just sold off most of its assets to Disney with a few strings attached by the Justice Department that the FOX broadcast network, Fox Sports 1 channel, and Fox News Channel can not be part of the deal. Disney is more interested in the 21st Century Fox movie catalogue and studios for it’s own future streaming service than a heavily conservative news network. Disney, which is soon to launch its own streaming service to rival Netflix is betting that even without net neutrality consumers would be willing to pay extra for a streaming service that includes all Disney, Star Wars, and Marvel movies to name a few headliners that now comes from its massive production studio. That leaves Fox News dangling in the wind without an ISP behind it, nor a production studio base to push the channel into the future.

So you’d think that with all this bad news staring Fox News in the face that they would do their best to try and save their own future and speak out against ending net neutrality. But since the news company has become seemingly nothing more than a mouth piece for the Trump administration thanks to Jane Mayer’s reporting in the New Yorker, no one can be shocked to find out this is not the case.

A Fox News opinion piece by Jesse Hathaway and Justin Haskins from December 16, 2017 makes the argument for the FCC to end the Obama-era net neutrality rules. In the piece they say that “liberal activists took a concept everyone agreed on and warped its definition to satisfy their goal to expand government’s power over the internet.” Later on they claim again that it is all a play by the “left-wing Obama administration” to give the power of the internet to the power hungry hands of the government. Typical Fox News rhetoric that the overreaching Obama government was trying to take away all freedoms from all people, a staple of what the network was known for and found success with. But there in lies the problem.

If anything, the loss of net neutrality will harm the conservative skewed media as a whole in the future.

If anything, the loss of net neutrality will harm the conservative skewed media as a whole in the future. Surely all of this won’t happen over night, but with the prospect of Fox News being shut out by leading ISP’s (and it’s television revenue numbers taking a hit as the network’s median age of viewer sits around 65 years old and rising with the increase of youth cord cutters), the leading conservative media giant will be in major trouble. Up and coming conservative media provider Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is one of the largest conglomerates of local television affiliates, is now making a push into national media distribution through its online over-the-top news outlet Circa. But again, while Sinclair’s local affiliates won’t be under threat as they aren’t affected by cord cutters since the stations are free over-the-air anyways, they don’t control any cable or internet providers to back up their online viewability.

Conservatives and the Republican Party are so big on spreading the idea of free market capitalism that they would make the push to allow ISP’s to tell its customers what it can and can’t see for a price. So why would AT&T allow Circa or Fox News to make money at the expense of being to provide the same idea (news content) on CNN?

This seeming push by Republicans and the Trump administration to tear down all things with Barack Obama’s finger prints on them during his time in the Oval Office has been a corner stone of their agenda since the 2016 election. Have they finally come to an issue while drunk on their own power where they are willing to die on the hill and lose their friendly media outlets to prove a point? In that same piece by Hathaway and Haskins, they say that “net neutrality wasn’t really about paid prioritization or ensuring internet ‘fairness.’” Fox News’ financial bottom line might soon find out just how wrong that idea is.

Why Racism and Extremism is More Valuable to Fox News Than Advertisers

Protests Outside Fox News Headquarters in New York (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Fox News has been making news itself with a number of its high valued personalities creating waves with inflammatory, politically incorrect, or just flat out racist comments. This in turn has caused a backlash towards the network by taking aim at it’s sponsors for shows hosted by the likes of Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro. Protests have even taken place outside the Fox News Channel building to bring attention to these comments while major advertisers were inside having meetings about future sponsorship with Fox News.

While advertising dollars do bring in a lot of money for the conservative skewed network, and no business ever wants to pass up on any money let alone advertisements on a television channel, the end result shows that Fox News values the loud extremist comments from its show hosts and find them more valuable to continue making money than trying to quiet them down to appease sponsors. The reason is carriage charges.

Cable television channels work by cutting deals with your local cable carrier and charging the carrier a certain amount for each channel. The carrier then takes those fees and passes them along to the subscriber which is why cable bills continued to climb higher over the past few decades. Most cable channels are also owned by major media companies who will force the cable carriers to take a whole package of their channels and slap each channel with their own carriage fee. ESPN for example is by far the highest charge for a cable channel, however parent company Disney will only allow ESPN to be picked up by a cable carrier if they also pick up ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPNU and usually other Disney owned networks like the Disney Channel and (just for an example) the formerly run Soap Network. That’s right, it used to be that the only way to get your live sports is if reruns of “Days of Our Lives” was allowed to join the party, even if you only want to watch Monday Night Football and never turned on the Soap Network.

Of course a lot of this is starting to change with the Millennial Generation starting the trend of cord cutting that cable TV has never seen before. That is forcing channels into live streaming services or “Over the top” channels that bypass the cable carriage charges. While that’s the future and cable subscription numbers aren’t as high as they used to be, they are still absurdly high overall allowing cable channels to keep raking in money through carriage fees.

This more than anything is where Fox News is bringing in most of its revenue. According to SNL Kagan, in 2017 Fox News was charging $1.55 per subscriber per month, one of the highest fee charges of any channel outside of ESPN. As of 2015 over 94.7 million households get Fox News as part of their subscription package meaning the network is pulling in $1,761,420,000 a year if we are going off of those numbers. That number doesn’t change if the average viewership of any Fox News show charts at a Nielsen rating of 6.0, 0.6, or even a straight up 0. Compare that to a 2018 S&P Global Market Intelligence estimate that the network pulls in less than $1 billion from all of its ad venue.

Now before you go claiming that Fox News is stealing this money from you because you pay for it without ever watching the channel, it’s best to point out that CNN and MSNBC (like all other cable channels) are doing the same thing, although not to the price point that Fox News is bringing in. In 2015 CNN was available in 96.4 million households and MSNBC was available in 94.5 million so it’s not as if Fox News is blocking out its competition for carriage fee dollars.

While you might check CNN to see what the news is, viewers watch Fox News to see what Fox News says.

The biggest difference between Fox News and its traditional on-air rivals is that the network’s higher extremist content creates a higher call to action and a culture of those watching to demand that network specifically in an almost Howard Beale-esque kind of following. While you might check CNN to see what the news is, viewers watch Fox News to see what Fox News says. It’s why the Fox News has constantly been the most watched cable news channel for over a decade now.

That demand is why people like Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro are so valuable, even more so than advertisers. Should Fox try to tone down their vitriol, or even fire them to woo back sponsorship dollars, the network would feel the wrath of a viewership that demands Fox News and having a large enough audience constantly demanding Fox News keeps it on the basic cable channels of your cable subscription package, bringing in those sweet sweet carriage charges. With enough people demanding Fox News be on, the cable channels will keep it on, no matter who isn’t also watching. While Fox News would love to have sponsors besides a three minute infomercial from the My Pillow guy, losing those subscription fees with the loss of Hannity or Pirro would be the bigger concern.

This comes even more into play with Fox News’ biggest competition: newer conservative media. Since it’s inception, Fox News was the conservative voice up against MSNBC’s liberal views and CNN’s attempts to stay in the middle. Fox News brags about being the most watched, but in reality if a viewer despised everything Barack Obama said during his presidency, that viewer was always going to go to Fox News and thus the network was never in competition with MSNBC for that pair of eyes. But now with news and information more available with the internet, Fox News’ hold on the conservative voice is being threatened. Yes there’s always been smaller places like InfoWars or Breitbart, but now the first real and biggest competitor for Fox News is major conservative affiliate conglomerate Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Sinclair, which owns a number of local over-the-air affiliates of all different networks that reaches the FCC limit of 39% of the country, has made news themselves by forcing their local stations to read or air vastly conservative narrated ideas and passing them off as your regular local news. Sinclair also attempted to expand even further with the purchase of the Tribune Company that would allow them to broadcast over 80% of the country, but was eventually shot down by the FCC for breaching the 39% rule. Much less talked about is that Sinclair has also taken it’s conservative voice and brought it to the internet with its own national news outlet: Circa. Here Sinclair can reach out to the entire nation without FCC regulation through not just text stories but also that basics for a live streaming of a news channel. Unlike Fox News, Circa would not be pulling in subscriber fees and need to survive on advertisement dollar.

The danger for Fox News is that should they try to save their own advertising dollars and fire Sean Hannity or Jeanine Pirro, an up and coming news outlet like Circa would snap them up extremely fast just for the headlines alone and to be seen as an equal to Fox News rather than just a start-up by Sinclair. Hannity’s large followers who demand to see him, will have no problem jumping ship from conservative Fox News to conservative Circa since the political content will be mostly the same. However that will be devastating to Fox News, who with less and less demand for their extreme hosts, will be easier to cut from cable packages as more and more people become cord cutters.

This is especially frightening for a news network that in 2017 Nielsen Live projected its viewership to have a median age of 65. While that might mean the older generation is less likely to jump from TV and start using newer technology like live streaming, it also means that as the current viewership starts to die out, the next generation of older conservative viewers will be more used to getting their content from an online source that isn’t Fox News.

The future for Fox News becomes even more murkier with the recent sale of 21st Century Studios and other FOX acquisitions to the Walt Disney Company for $71 billion. While Fox News (along with FOX Network, Fox Sports 1, and a few other entities) is not part of the Disney deal, it guts the media power of News Corps that has been the driving force behind Fox News. And unlike MSNBC (owned by Comcast, the largest cable and internet provider in the country) and CNN (recently acquired by AT&T, the second largest cable and internet provider in the country) or Circa (owned by the largest over the air affiliate conglomerate), Fox News is left out to dry by itself with no real internet or live stream backing. Sure they’ve launched a live stream channel Fox News Nation, but it’s based entirely as supplemental to the viewer already watching Fox News on television (the 65 year old median crowd) and not as a newer option towards a younger demographic to be a part of without a cable subscription.

Fox News needs the subscription carriage fees not just to maintain its empire, but to have a conservative news empire at all.

Fox News needs the subscription carriage fees not just to maintain its empire, but to have a conservative news empire at all. Yes advertising dollars help, but the extreme points of views that it offers is far more valuable in keeping viewers in order to staying alive. While major companies like Bayer and Weight Watchers that have pulled ads from the network might be making headlines, it’s not the most important thing for Fox News to worry about. Sean Hannity is more valuable to them spewing out racists and extreme nonsense than reigning in the act attempting to book more ad spots than a third My Pillow infomercial.

If you really take issue with how that business of Fox News is working, boycotting advertisers helps, but making noise to the cable providers themselves would go a lot further to hitting the news network in the wallet.

Why Chris Wallace Might Be the Most Powerful Man in News (and it Has Nothing to do With Politics)

On the February 17th edition of Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace who is mostly identified for his work on the Fox News Channel, called out presidential advisor Stephen Miller on Donald Trump’s claim that a national emergency was occurring along the country’s southern border. When Wallace asked Miller “Can you point to a single instance when the president asked Congress for money, Congress refused to give him that money and the president then invoked national emergency powers to get the money?”

Miller tried to dodge around the question and answered “Can you find one foreign threat in the world today, outside this country’s borders, that currently kills more Americans than the threats crossing our Southern border?”

That forced Wallace to retort that “the joy of this is I get to ask you questions, and you don’t get to ask me.” When Wallace forced Miller to say yes or no to his original question about Congressional financing, Miller refused to do so.

Stephen Miller and Chris Wallace from the February 17th edition of Fox News Sunday

The exchanged shocked many across the nation by seeing a Fox News anchor so blatantly step up to challenge not just a conservative policy maker but one so highly placed in the Trump administration. To be fair, Wallace has also challenged presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders about her statistics on 4,000 terrorists coming across the southern border and the GOP as a whole for complaining about so many investigations into President Trump from a party that was all too happy to investigate everything during the Obama years from Benghazi to the Fast and Furious situation. And those are just since the start of 2019. Wallace’s actions have brought a lot of people to openly wonder when Fox News will do away with someone on their payroll who is ripping into their political ideology and fire him. The reality is that Chris Wallace likely has the safest position on television and it has nothing to do with politics but rather an entirely different concept: affiliates.

To follow along one needs to understand how the business of television actually works, something that most people take entirely for granted. The channels that come to your television by paying for cable are owned and run by the major media corporations that control them. News Corps runs Fox News, Comcast runs MSNBC, TimeWarner (now AT&T with the recent merger) runs CNN. They imput the carrying charges to cable companies, control the sponsorship dollars, and can be shown directly across the entire country without the FCC even having a say in it as the FCC doesn’t have much to any jurisdiction over what goes out across cable media.

According to FCC law, a company can only own broadcast stations that “reaches no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households.”

Where the FCC does have power is with the terrestrial “over the air” channels that you can receive on your TV free from a local broadcaster. While this would be your local ABC or NBC station, for most of the country, Disney and Comcast do not actually own your local channel carrying their content. According to FCC law, a company can only own broadcast stations that “reaches no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households.” So while Disney and Comcast are free to own some of these local stations themselves, they can’t own one in every market. Thus the major media companies will own the stations in the biggest markets so for example WABC in New York City is owned by a subsidiary of Disney itself.

But in the markets across the rest of the country, the local stations themselves are owned by other media conglomerates who will own numerous stations as long as they stay below the 39 percent marker. Fox12 KPTV in Portland for example is owned by the Meredith Corporation, and KATU (Portland’s ABC affiliate) is owned by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group. The national networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) will provide their content to the local stations they don’t own, so Dancing With The Stars will still be shown in Portland, but it is on a station affiliated with ABC and not directly from Disney. As part of this symbiotic relationship ABC will air their national commercials during the programming to generate revenue for Disney but allows open time slots in the commercial time for the local affiliate to sell some local advertisements which keeps the affiliates afloat which then allows ABC to continue having a partner to air their content. It’s a marriage of convenience for both sides that has worked since television first came to American living rooms.

However the local affiliates still have some power over the national networks by having the final say in what is actually put on over their airwaves. If an affiliate in a local market has a problem with the content the network provides them, they can choose not to air it. When Steven Spielberg made a deal with NBC to air his movie Schindler’s List on broadcast television in 1997, he asked that nothing be changed or edited out, including the use of profanity and nudity during scenes of the impactful film depicting the Holocaust. While most stations had no problem with that demand due to the historical accuracy of the film, a few NBC affiliates went into major debates or threatened to make edits themselves claiming to keeping up standards against nudity on their air. A similar case happened again with Spielberg when airing Saving Private Ryan as some affiliate stations were uneasy about showing the film on Veterans’ Day to their local market due to the use of the F-word that had to be shown in the movie for fear of repercussions from the FCC. You can make a case for either side, but that’s not for here and now. This is just a few examples of affiliates having the power to say no to their big network providers.

So this idea of being able to say no brings us back to Chris Wallace. Over the air stations are also required by FCC licensing laws to broadcast content in the best interest of the public. For situations of national importance, like a State of the Union address or election results, the local affiliates will turn their programming over to the national networks who have the bigger production budgets. For ABC, CBS, and NBC it’s an easy fix as they use their national nightly news teams that are all respected and publicly acknowledged for not holding any slant on how they present the news. FOX however not only doesn’t have a national nightly news program for their network affiliates, the only news outlet they own is the Fox News Channel on cable that is known for being heavily conservative with its views. For the cable channels that’s fine and does good business, but during a State of the Union when a viewer has options to listen to Lester Holt, or Jeff Glor, or George Stephanopoulos, who is the face that FOX can offer its affiliates to compete with?

The Fox News Channel’s most well known names are commonly its least respected by the broader public.

The Fox News Channel’s most well known names are commonly its least respected by the broader public. If FOX the network offers its State of the Union programming to be hosted by Sean Hannity or Jeanine Pirro, most if not all of the local affiliates outside of the News Corps owned 39 percent would rather pass and instead decide to produce a local broadcast themselves even at a higher cost. That especially would go for affiliates in markets that typically skew more liberal as using such FOX supplied content would be a ratings and public relations disaster if Sean Hannity is the face of a non-News Corps owned station for such a major event.

What FOX the network needs to do to appease their affiliates is to offer them a face for major news stories that is a big enough name to be known to the audience but still be someone with enough credence that isn’t viewed as a puppet for a conservative-leaning corporation. If Hannity is put up as the face of KPTV in Portland, it will give the impression that everything airing on KPTV, both local and national content, is done with a harsh conservative narrative. In a highly liberal market like Portland that would be a death blow for not just KPTV but also general Fox programming like Empire, Gotham, or Family Guy. If KPTV, and all other markets looses that viewership due to thinking Hannity is the face of it all, ratings across the country will drop causing national advertisers to pull out and find larger audiences on other networks to put it’s marketing dollars into that have no relations to News Corps.

So slide in Chris Wallace. To make sure that he is viewed as an important enough name to compete with Holt and Glor, Wallace is put as the host of Fox News Sunday that while it does re-airs later in the day on the Fox News Channel, it originates on FOX the network that airs across all the affiliates to compete with the other traditional Sunday morning news shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation. This puts Wallace already on the air for affiliates who are clearly happy with his performances in their own markets enough to not preempt Fox News Sunday during its normal weekly time.

That’s not to say Wallace has to be entirely liberal based to dispel the idea that he is just a conservative news mouthpiece in disguise. What he needs to do is call out both sides equally and properly perhaps more than any other news host. With Fox News Channel’s warmth towards President Trump and members of his administration, many people of interest from the conservative side of the aisle flock towards Fox for interviews. While many in the Trump administration might try to avoid news programs like Face the Nation, they will still come to Fox Sunday Morning knowing if they ever want to be given air time for the rest of Fox News programming, they’ll have to at least speak to Wallace. And Wallace has proven that won’t allow them a free pass that most of his colleagues on the cable channel would offer. See Stephen Miller and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in just the last few weeks.

It may seem like a news show hosted by a Fox News host holding conservative guests to the same standards one would expect them to be held to on any other major news organization as odd. Sean Hannity would never do such a thing, but Chris Wallace is no Sean Hannity, and as much as the higher ups at the Fox News Channel might not like one of their own questioning the stars of their own political spectrum, there’s nothing they can do about it without angering its legion of affiliates. Without the affiliates the rest of the FOX content from news to general programming will take a hit in the wallet and in the end that’s what its really all about.

I have no doubt that Chris Wallace is a fine and upstanding journalist in the grand scheme of the news world. It just also so happens that because of how the world of television business works, he’s found himself as the safest and perhaps most powerful interviewer there is. Politics be damned, it’s all about the bottom line.

Why Dreaming of Walter Cronkite Won’t Solve Today’s Media Problem

Let’s start at the absolute basics. What is the pluralized term for media? Hint, it’s a trick question as media is the pluralized version of the word “medium.” It’s stunning how many people in the world don’t know that and if we as a people don’t understand what the word “media” itself means, its likely we won’t even understand what the word is supposed to do.

President Donald Trump has consistently labeled the media the “enemy of the people.”

Liberals blame the media for its coverage of the 2016 for allowing Trump to win.

It’s extremely easy and simple to be blaming the media for all the troubles in the world and why not? They are the gate keepers for what information is passed our way to how the world works. In a world where with a push of a button we can order what we want, when we want, where ever we want, we’ve become numb to the unreal expectations that such a mindset should be a part of everything in our lives, especially the information for the world around us.

The greatest thing the internet revolution ever did was give everyone in the world a voice, while at the same time the worst thing the internet revolution ever did was give everyone in the world a voice. One of the biggest gripes I hear about news is it’s not like the old days with Cronkite, or Murrow, or Jennings when news could be trusted. Of course today’s news isn’t like the old days when there was only three options and that was it. Like a basic economics class will teach you, news also falls in line to the rules of supply and demand. With the internet and the increase of information access, now all sorts of news outlets are available at the snap of a finger 24-7. Instead of just Cronkite, you can get top journalistic content from ABC, NBC, CBS, AP, UPI, AFP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Al Jazeera, PBS, VOA, just to name a few of the respected organizations that when dealing with news stories are mostly known for being facts first.

But for the “on demand” generation, we have the gift of instant access to everything we want including fringe news and opinion organizations that can slant to fit any appetite, like the Huffington Post, Breitbart, Vice, and countless others. The Independent Journal Review even runs twin sites in order to skew both left and right at the same time to stratify whatever your flavor is.

The information revolution is currently in all its glory with all these options, meaning that in a world so full of news, no story ever gets left in the dark. Someone is always looking and will hold any injustice to accountability. But that also spotlights the information revolution in all its terror by allowing the user to get the news that best fits them rather than the best fit for the news.

On February 26th, a headline on the Huffington Post blares that “Cohen Set To Spill on Trump!” on the day the President’s “fixer” was set to testify behind closed doors to the senate. Meanwhile on FoxNews.com Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz has an opinion piece where he questions early on “why Democrats are wasting time on someone with a history of lying to them”?

So which is it? Is Cohen ready to come clean for his sins or is he going to continue to lie in order to dig himself out of his lies? The answer is it doesn’t matter what Cohen does, only what the reader wants to see. With so many options to choose from how we want this one event covered, we can pick and choose exactly how we want to read it and a news organization on the spectrum will be there to fulfill our wishes.

“One begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” -Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes would certainly be appalled by this as the famous fictional detective warned what happens when “one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” If I already know everything is Trump’s fault, I’m going to find the news that fits my feelings and anything that says the contrary is what’s wrong with the media for not calling out the president. If I already know the liberals are scheming with dark forces just to try and depose Trump from office, any story that paints that picture gets the label of fake news. Facts have become weapons to try and make a point instead of being the point of the information.

This doesn’t always have to be a Red vs. Blue concept, but can be even in the way the news is represented as well. During the rash of Democrats throwing their hats in the ring for the 2020 presidential election, there was a grumbling of voices upset at the media for how they were portraying each candidate instantly as “how likable” they are. It wasn’t about the candidates policies or how they might do in the oval office, but more how their voice sounds and if they are the kind of person you’d want to share a beer with. A friend of mine here in Portland was making this case while lamenting about how someone like Walter Cronkite would never do such a thing. When I asked where he had seen the story about a candidates likability he replied with “Politico,” a media organization known for its hard coverage of government with a straight up political mindset. You know who didn’t work for Politico?: Walter Cronkite. He famously was the trusted newsman for CBS, the same news organization that current CBS Nightly News anchor Jeff Glor never ran a story on a candidates likability. Neither did Lester Holt on NBC. Or David Muir on ABC. But all have paid the penalty of “not being Walter Cronkite” because of an analysis piece by Politico.

We treat the media too much like a single entity when we need to remember that the word media itself is in its plural form. We have all the information in the world but we need the information of where that information comes from. Not all news produced will end up being the truth, or maybe the truth will be produced but told in two different ways without either side being a lie.

In the same way we would do a quick search of reviews for the new Thai restaurant before we order take out on demand, we as a people need to know where we are getting our news from and what possible skew it has. If we got one sub-par order of pad thai we wouldn’t blame every Thai restaurant we come across so if there’s one story we don’t like we shouldn’t go blaming the media as a whole. It’s up to the media to meet the professional journalistic standards of making the world a more informed place, but its also up to the public to know where to get that news from.

And that isn’t as hard as it sounds. A general feeling about the news media is that it tells the stories and the people are forced to listen, when in reality it is the other way around. While the purpose of the news media is to inform the audience, every organization is still a business and needs viewers and readers in order to stay afloat and continue to tell stories. A group can put together the most amazing story about migrating tree frogs but if no one reads it does that story matter at all?

For example I worked at ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut for 10 years and even though I was not part of the final process in deciding which stories get the highest billing, whenever someone would hear my place of employment they would always give me their sports news opinion and nothing riled up the masses more than Tim Tebow. The Heisman Trophy winner from Florida had a roller coaster NFL career before years later switching sports and beginning a stint as a minor league baseball player with New York Mets. Whenever Tebow did anything that would be considered mundane if anyone else in the sport had done so, it would become a top story because it was Tebow. Tebow signs a minor league contract? Front page. Tebow joins the locker room for the first time? Front page. This Tebow-mania coverage would infuriate people I would talk too.

Tim Tebow at Mets’ Spring Training in 2016 (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

And yet, almost every one of those Tebow stories would finish the day as one of the most read, most clicked, most watched pieces of news for the day, week, or month. When Tebow stepped up to his first spring training at bat and launched a home run, the video clip instantly jumped to one of the most watched video segments of the entire year for all of ESPN.com. So why was Tebow always front page news? Because people cared and wanted to read it. If the story of Tebow hitting a meaningless home run in a meaningless spring training game posted very little viewing numbers, no editor in the world would waste valuable front page space to it. But for an editor to not post a news story that is so highly in demand would be a disservice to both his job and the news audience as a whole, as evidence by a story that has nothing to do with politics but by someone hitting a ball with a stick very far.

So what does Tebow have to do with how the general news media is covering our world today? The way to get the media back on track to what we felt like it once was is to read, click, and watch the stories that best represent the actual story and not the slant of what we want. If you don’t want the first reaction of any politician announcing their presidential candidacy to be “how likable are they” then don’t read that story. Read the one on their policies and how they will make the best president as a whole. Angry at one side calling Cohen a liar or being giddy at his spilling the beans before he even testifies? Then don’t read those stories and wait until he has actually spoken to get a report straight from his quotes from an unskewed news source. If you have a problem with how the news media is being used, then be part of the solution instead. The news world will change with the will of the masses. That’s what mass media is all about after all.

Walter Cronkite is a legend for being the perfect newsman for his time and place, but in a world where everyone has a voice now, his type of broadcasting wouldn’t satisfy the public in this current day and age. Rather than lament about being Cronkite-less, we need to understand how the media works and where we are getting our news from. Only then will we be able to get back the concept of the truth in news that we want through the number of reputably down the middle sources. Then we’ll be able to allow the next Cronkite to come into being and even if that isn’t the news how we want it to be it should be the news “that’s the way it is.”