“For the past 10 years FOX News has had higher ratings and the largest audience numbers…”
This fails as a false comparison fallacy, Fox isn’t ‘news,’ it’s entertainment for conservatives, whose audience is looking for reinforcement of rightist dogma, not facts or the truth.
This also fails as a hasty generalization fallacy, as Fox viewers make up but a tiny percentage of the overall American adult population.
And it fails as a post hoc fallacy, as it’s idiocy to infer that Fox’s numbers represent ‘approval’ of a majority of Americans for conservative dogma.
And that error is committed constantly on these pages. Broadcasters, and journalists long before there was broadcasting, learned eons ago that "approval" is not what wins viewers, listeners or readers. Salacious emotional stink bombs are what does that. That's exactly why fake wrestling, and gossip shows, and "reality" TV where people stranded on an island naked are forced to eat bugs, and wankers on stage bringing philandering fathers out to face paternity tests, all $ell. Facts are boring; emotion $ells. It's why any "news" broadcast or "news"paper more interested in its profit margin than its integrity leads off with the most dramatic, heart-rending psychological emotion-hooks it can find, embodied in the old adage, "if it bleeds it leads". Because that's what $ells, and when you're a huckster posing as news, your objective is not informing, but $elling.
The name "Fox News" does play loosely with the term "news", as traditionally "______ News" has meant an entity that
reports the news. FNC does do a bit of that, specifically in the dayparts that are the relative wasteland of TV ratings (because people are at work). But its bread and butter (ratings) are in prime time where reporting is put to bed and it presents people
talking about the news. In this it becomes less a "news" channel and more a gossip channel, essentially an
Entertainment Tonight, where the players are politicians rather than celebrities. Here lives the slant and the angry guys pounding on tables and the insinuations of drama llamas, none of which is a part of Journalism. Because when you center on politic
ians rather than polic
y, (i.e.
people rather than abstract ideas), you get to inject ulterior motives and conspiracies and above all, Fear and Loathing. And that is what draws ratings, and that's what $ells.
Nobody knows this better than Rupert Murdoch, who before FNC existed, built his fortune on gossipy tabloid rags. It's exactly the same pattern, the only new ingredient being politics. And just to connect with the OP's topic here, the "Page 3 girl" is one of those Murdoch selling tools. To suggest Rupert Murdoch doesn't see the profit value in that ingredient is to vastly underestimate his business acumen -- which again has nothing to do with Journalism.
So "Fox News" is an accurate name only insofar as it
draws from the News to derive its ratings. But those don't come from
reporting what's going on. They come from inciting emotions
about what's going on. The Page Three Girls certainly play a vital role in that -- as do the garish studio colors, as do the suggestive questioning chyrons constantly running along the bottom, as does the editors' choice of what stories are prioritized. Every bit of it is consciously and conspicuously designed to mine the emotions, just as that screaming-headline tabloid by the supermarket cashier is. They derive from the same mentality: emotional manipulation for the objective of profit.
That doesn't mean the Page Three Girls are "dumb". But it does mean a female is not going to get a job hosting at FNC if she doesn't look like a Page Three Girl. Because that would not advance the mission.