Faux News Gives Us The Business

So how exactly is the Faux Business Channel holding up after a little more than one week on the air?

Well, here is how New York Times business writer Joe Nocera summed it up in this column from last Saturday (I hope to be out of catch-up mode soon)…

It was Thursday around 4:30, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

All week long, I’d been sporadically watching Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox Business Network, which made its debut on Monday. I was trying to figure out what, exactly, it was trying to do — and who its audience was supposed to be. It wasn’t an easy task.

One minute Fox was doing a segment that included a $1 million diamond; the next it was giving tips on how to avoid foreclosure. It would home in on the stock market and then report on the death of a teenager in Virginia from a staph infection, reports that included several truly silly efforts to frame the tragedy as a business story. On Tuesday afternoon, while CNBC was dissecting Intel’s earnings, Fox was running its “Happy Hour” show, which is set in a bar. A co-host named Cody, a dude so hip he doesn’t tuck his shirt in, was interviewing a random customer about his plans for Christmas spending. “Expensive chocolates,” was the man’s reply.

The only commonality was tone. In a week when Countrywide’s chief executive was discovered to be under S.E.C. investigation, when the market lost about 4 percent of its value, when evidence emerged that the housing slump was deepening, the tone at Fox Business was upbeat. Relentlessly, incorrigibly, unapologetically upbeat.

Nocera correctly points out that it’s unfair to judge a new TV network, among other things, based on only its first week on the air (his statement that “start-ups are never pretty” couldn’t be more true).

But the product of Roger Ailes, the head of the “Fox Business Network,” didn’t “hit the ground running” with a ready-made audience of people eager to easily digest his bilious propaganda disguised as actual reporting this time; this is very much unlike the advantage Ailes enjoyed when he launched the Fox network (of everything besides business) in 1986.

No, this time Ailes has to cut into the audience share of CNBC, the television network watched by industry professionals who care first, last and in between about how the markets are doing and don’t really care a whole lot about headline “stories” such as “Coca-Cola Is A Great Business” and “Buying On Margin Is Crazy.”

So we’ll see what happens, though given the fact that we’re talking about a project of Roger Ailes here, I’m not expecting to see anything of worth when all is said and done, particularly given the following typical piece of Ailes agit-prop from Nocera’s column…

When I spoke to him, he was no less inflammatory. “They’ve (CNBC) decided recently that America is not such a terrible place and capitalism isn’t so bad”—another reaction, he seemed to be saying, to the prospect of some new pro-America competition. “They used to get really excited if a C.E.O. was going to jail and they got depressed if a company announced a profit. They are offended by rich people unless it’s them.” He paused before delivering the punch line. “That’s because they all went to journalism school.”

Oh, what a cutup you are, Roger old boy!

I’m not surprised to read such about such an arrogant, dismissive attitude towards a network that actually knows how to do business reporting professionally, especially after witnessing the following type of “journalism” in this area from your network…



I’ll have a good laugh if your much-hyped “business” channel ends up going the way of this misguided little experiment.