You have to be careful when you are in a business where you need to get as many people to come through your door that you do not anger too large of a group of people.
Sure, you are going to get the occasional pain in the butt that somehow cannot be pleased and refuses to come back. Then again, you also need to make sure that as many people are being taken care of as possible.
In the context of a news channel, you have to make sure that you are telling the truth as much of the time as you possibly can. If you don’t, then you run the risk of losing all credibility and people turning you off.
I have seen print publications go down and go down quickly solely on the notion of their credibility being shot.
The new year has been anything but happy for Fox News.
Ratings for the first two weeks of 2021 show the network — usually a dominant force in cable news — trailing rivals CNN and MSNBC for the first time in 20 years, according to Forbes.
On the first week of the new year, CNN was first in both daytime and primetime ratings, averaging 2.8 million viewers per day and 4.2 million in prime time.
Fox News was not even close, with an average of 1.7 million daytime viewers and 32 million in prime time.
The report said Fox could not even beat out MSNBC, which had 2.3 million viewers during the day and 3.8 million in prime time.
The trend did not get better, with Fox trailing both networks in total viewers and the 25-54 age group.
January marks part of a long slide for Fox, which has seen its overall viewers slide by about 20 percent since the election, according to CNN.
In an opinion piece Friday, Mediaite‘s Colby Hall asserted the decline is linked to the troubled times of President Donald Trump and the controversies surrounding him.
“But the days of Fox News’s uninterrupted dominance appear to be on leave, which neatly coincides with the final days of President Donald Trump, whose administration the vast majority of the network’s personalities fell in line behind. That’s a driver, but not the sole reason why Fox News is in the T.V. ratings doldrums,” he wrote.