FOX is a MONSTER, a MONSTER I tell ya!!!!!
Ah, I don't think it's a "monster" myself. More like a tick you didn't notice right away, and now it's embedded and engorged.
What (I think) the OP meant by Fox bringing on "the death of our news media":
Actual straight objective news, where it exists, never makes
money. News is not a profit-making venture. All those alphabet network news shows we grew up with were being subsidized by the Beverly Hillbillies and I love Lucy 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. That's what CNN was doing pre-Fox, but their advantage was being the only (at the time) 24/7 news outlet, so you didn't have to wait for the evening alphabets.
When Fox bubbled up it took a new approach to cut costs (and this is
independent of any political angle): 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 and shake their fists 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.
But what you've accomplished isn't news; it's news theater. CNN, doing straight news (at the time), then sees its ratings dwindle, because TV viewers will always gravitate toward the drama and the outrageous and the ridiculous over cold hard fact. Emotion always trumps impartiality to the unwashed.
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.
Unfortunately, all of them being commercial entities, CNN saw the financial writing on the wall and jumped into the same sewer, although not working the LCD as well. MSNBC saw it and said "me too", and down goes media (Howard Cosell voice).
Roger Ailes may be a lot of things but one of them is not stupid. He understands media manipulation as well as anyone does. It's all over these documents (see the Bush golfing passage earlier). And he documents my point about cutting the costs of news as well as steering it, in the article, with
>> Television News Incorporated (TVN), a right-wing news service Ailes worked on in the early 1970s after he got fired by the White House. According to Rolling Stone, TVN was financed by conservative beermonger Joseph Coors, and its mandate sounds exactly like a privately funded version of Capitol News Service: "[TVN] was designed to inject a far-right slant into local news broadcasts by providing news clips that stations could use without creditand at a fraction of the true costs of production." <<
News is expensive; news theater is cheap. Bring an understanding of how to use it as a political spinning wheel, and voilà: Fox Noise.