Ratings have nothing to do with "truth". Generally they work against each other. In fact almost always.
Where is your evidence of that?
You want me to go through this AGAIN?
Ratings measure attention. That's it. They're used to determine how much a broadcaster can charge for advertising, based on how many eyeballs (or ears in radio) that broadcaster can deliver.
They have nothing to do with "truth" or "assent" or anything else of an analytic nature, especially television, which is a two-dimensional propaganda machine that has one practical purpose-- to sell advertising.
That attention is not drawn by truth or objectivity or cerebral analysis. Those shows tank. Attention is drawn by fake wrestling, paternity tests and people stranded on an island forced to eat bugs. Viewers are drawn by scandal, drama, angst, fear and loathing. Accidents and fires and tornadoes. That's where "if it bleeds it leads" comes from -- it draws viewers. That's why your local Fraction News leads off not with what happened in your city council but some fire or flood or shooting in some neighborhood you never heard of. The same reason people rubberneck at a bad car wreck -- not because they 'agree' with the idea of car wrecks; because it's spectacle. It's drama.
Objective news, where it exists, never makes money. News is not a profit source. All those alphabet network news shows we grew up with were being subsidized by the Beverly Hillbillies and Dick van Dyke shows, which DO make money. News is expensive. A lot of traveling, a lot of staff and stringers, a lot of equipment flying around, news bureaus all over the world -- costs high, return minimal.
When Fox bubbled up it took a new approach to cut costs: rather than deal with all that expense, plunk some talking heads in a studio talking
about the news, rather than reporting it from afar. And given Murdoch's legacy in tabloid newspapers where he made his fortune, make it a gossip show about
politicians rather than about policy. Then dress up that studio with garish colors and graphics that go whooooosh and suggestive screen chyrons, and plunk some angry white guys down to piss and moan all night in
commentary programs -- which is where the Fox ratings are-- and there you have your viewers. Because you have brought in angst and suspicion and conspiracy -- the fear and loathing. The Emotion. The
spectacle.
Oh and the short-skirted bimbos, they don't hurt either.
There's no emotion in real news (or in naked truth). "Storm headed for Iowa" = boring. "Storm heads to Iowa
where it will kill innocent bystanders, maybe you" = viewers. Making the impersonal
personal. What Fox broadcasts is not on the whole news, but news theater, dripping with emotion. And news theater will always outsell straight news. But in the process of all that angstmongering, truth is the first casualty. Straight truth is ... boring. "Boring" as far as "doesn't draw a crowd". When you're in the
commercial broadcast business, you need to draw a crowd. That's why a more cerebral program like Bill Buckley's had to use PBS; it wouldn't sell enough soap.
So that's what I mean by that.
