Buh Bye Bye Fox, Hello GBTV

“It was part political spectacle, part American Idol, part YouTube extravaganza, a pure Roger Ailes production—and the latest sign that the Fox News chairman is quietly repositioning America’s dominant cable-news channel.

“Hours before last week’s presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft?”

Why be a talking head when being a kingmaker is ever so much more fun?

“Fair and Balanced” must be a hard road to hoe when there’s a bloviating Bill O’Reilly holding the 8 p.m. slot with Glenn Beck now out there out scooping his former employer.

Critiquing the cable network’s last week presidential debate in Orlando, Kurtz wrote, ...”the real eye-opener was the sight of his anchors grilling the Republican contenders, which pleases the White House but cuts sharply against the network’s conservative image--and risks alienating its most rabid fans.”

As sure as they will be out there smearing the Tea Party, swarms of liberal detractors will still accuse conservative enemies of being Fox News drones even though their network has gone central.

But its “most rabid fans” have always known that Fox isn’t news but entertainment, Reality Television Supremo.

There are sure to be those who will be titillated by Aile’s admission that “O’reilly hates Sean and he hates Rush Limbaugh because they did better in radio than he did” (The Daily Beast, Sept. 25, 2011) or that he “admitted that he wants both Bill and Hillary Clinton to join Fox News”. (Huffington Post, Sept. 26, 2011).

But the increasing number of average people who do not count on cable television for their news will be out as usual plowing the Internet in search of the truth.

Fox executives who say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama’s election, but as the Tea Party’s popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream, are full of it.

The fact is that Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network, declined 11 percent in ratings in 2010.

“According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media (stateofthemedia.org) report, cable news viewership for CNN, MSNBC and Fox News fell substantially in 2010--13.7 percent in aggregate for a sharper decline than any other sector.” (The Hollywood Reporter, March 13, 2011). “And the cable news networks’ declines were sharpest in primetime, where median viewership plummeted 16 percent to an average of 3.2 million, while daytime tune-in was down 12 percent.”

It must grate Ailes who said “he didn’t mind if people thought Glenn Beck was fired from the channel” (Huffington Post) is routinely out-scooping Fox News with his own television show GBTV.

Viewers flocking to GBTV like sparrows to bread crumbs recognize the difference between “fair and balanced” and the “truth lives here”.

Ailes' boast that “Every other network has given all their shows to liberals,” “We are the balance” is fast fading to irrelevance in hard times.

In today’s Obama world, people don’t want manufactured balance. They want the truth.