On this day in 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News Channel and changed the American news landscape, writes Eliot Wilson
Thirty years ago, 20th Century Fox was a film and animation production company. It had been purchased in 1985 by media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the Australian taking US citizenship as a condition of the Federal Communications Commission approving the takeover.
The next year, 1986, Murdoch launched a television network, the Fox Broadcasting Company, a direct challenge to America’s “Big Three”: ABC, CBS and NBC. 20th Century Fox had dabbled in television as far back as 1948, producing the deliciously campy 1960s Batman (1966-68) for ABC and iconic Korean War comedy-drama M*A*S*H (1972-83) for CBS. There had been several attempts at a fourth network over the years, but none had achieved sustained success.
Rupert Murdoch was a different proposition.
Fox Broadcasting opened with The Late Show, hosted by Joan Rivers, but the project was greeted with scepticism and in some quarters ridicule. Why would this attempt at a fourth channel succeed where so many others had failed? The sceptics were badly mistaken. By the 1990s, Fox was profitable, in 1993 it secured the rights to American football’s top-tier NFL and from 1994 to 1996, in partnership with New World Communications, it tempted 12 new affiliated networks away from the Big Three. By 1996, Fox was capturing a third of television audiences and reached 96 per cent of American homes.
BSkyB had launched the 24-hour Sky News in 1989, and Murdoch wanted to replicate its success in the United States. At the beginning of 1996, he revealed that News Corp would start an American cable and satellite news channel as part of its worldwide platform.
“The appetite for news,” he declared, “particularly news that explains to people how it affects them, is expanding enormously.”
In February 1996, Murdoch found his chosen instrument: Roger Ailes, an abrasive veteran producer and Republican consultant, whose big break had been in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, was picked as the channel’s CEO and founding father. He quickly set to work, with months of 14-hour days and weeks of rehearsal.
The first day of Fox News Channel
Today in 1996, Fox News Channel began broadcasting. Initially it could reach 17m American households but was not available in New York or Los Angeles. News headlines were wrapped around 20-minute single-topic shows like Fox on Crime and Fox on Politics; Mike Schneider, a former anchor for ABC and NBC, helmed Fox’s flagship The Schneider Report; and evenings were the preserve of hard-edged opinion shows like The O’Reilly Report, The Crier Report and Hannity & Colmes.
Fox News was innovative in many ways. It relied heavily on brightly coloured, easy-to-read graphics, on-screen text summarised what speakers were saying and bullet points gave a stripped-down version of the commentary. The channel also created the “Fox News Alert”, which interrupted scheduled programming with breaking news. During the New York and Washington attacks on 11 September 2001, to manage the sheer volume of information, Fox introduced a news ticker along the bottom of the screen, a simple but revolutionary measure.
Commercially, Murdoch and Ailes had got it right. In 2002, Fox News overtook CNN in the ratings, its audience tripling in the early stages of the Iraq war. By 2006, it was home to eight of the top 10 most-watched nightly cable news shows. It became the most popular cable news channel in America and remains so nearly 20 years later, generating around 70 per cent of the Fox Corporation’s pre-tax profits.
Has it come at a price? It is hard to dispute that Fox News sits clearly to the right of centre, and has contributed to a sharp polarisation of American politics. It is trusted by a little under half of the population: crucially, two-thirds of Republicans regard it favourably, while a similar proportion of Democrats have an unfavourable view. Roger Ailes would counter, “We’re not programming to conservatives. We’re just not eliminating their point of view.”
Fox News did not explicitly endorse Donald Trump in the crowded Republican primaries in 2016, but once he won the nomination, it swung decisively behind him. Today, four senior members of the cabinet are former employees of the network.
The partisan nature of Fox News – though it is hardly unique in this – has intensified in the Trumpian era. The network’s interviews with the President are often described as “fawning”, and there is a clear editorial policy to downplay or ignore stories which are damaging to or negative about Trump and his administrations. Fox is also not afraid to attack rival media outlets including CNN and The New York Times.
America’s “Big Three” news channels are now Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. Murdoch has beaten his opponents. But how important is it really? The population of the United States is 340m: Fox News regularly attracts 2m-3m viewers, MSNBC manages just over 1m and CNN trails on perhaps half that. Watching cable news is a deeply niche activity.
In the end, then, has Fox News changed American voters, or merely amplified the small cohort which shouts loudly? Perhaps, to misquote Zhou Enlai, it is too early to tell.