Foxy Numbers

To hear the alarmist Fox News Channel claim it, they are the most powerful, most watched and wonderful news channel ever. On what do they base this claim? They have as many viewers as MSNBC and CNN combined. Their inference is that they, and they alone, are the popular voice for the vast majority of Americans. Let’s put this in perspective; something that Fox News Channel hates to do. Fox claims that approximately 3.8 million people watch their channel. That’s a lot of people, but on any given evening, the combined number of people watching NBC, ABC and CBS News is over 24 million viewers. Add the totals of MSNBC and CNN and it rises to about 27 million people who do not believe or support the conservative, right-wing, tea party view of the world. Even if you remove the numbers for liberal MSNBC, Fox is still far outnumbered by rational human beings. In other words, there are about six or seven times more people who watch daily TV news on mainstream media than on Fox. My numbers are not mathematically precise as they change from week to week and day to day, but generally speaking, MAINSTREAM MEDIA RULES! Why is that? We who support it know. Four reasons come to mind right away. Mainstream media doesn’t have an agenda, is not biased to anything other than fair and accurate journalism, does not knowingly report fake news and is not in any one political party’s pocket. Plus, and this is important to me, hate does not take a prominent role in the mainstream media. They will gore anybody’s ox who’s earned it, but it’s not political or personal. Someone who is more eloquent than I once said, “News has a liberal bias.” That’s because it’s new and newness scares the baggy pants off conservatives, right-wingers and tea partiers. Whatever their dying agenda is, it won’t sway the vast majority of mainstream Americans, and it looks like the Murdoch brothers are getting the message their father was too prejudiced to acknowledge. The days when white men ruled the Earth, black people sat in the back of the bus and women kept their place are over. Just ask Bill O’Reilly.