Fox Cable & TV Network Both on Top, Cable Dominates

Roger Ailes is the uncrowned king of TV or at least TV news on cable. Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune writes:

Much as Fox News Channel's commentators, such as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, overshadow its news reporting in the public's mind, Ailes' cable news outlet (and the whopping $700 million or so it adds to the bottom line) tends to eclipse the rest of his purview in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. empire.

Ailes is also chairman of the Twentieth Television and Fox Television Stations, which includes the Chicago duopoly of WFLD-Ch. 32 and WPWR-Ch. 50. As head of the station group, he'll be part of the decision whether Fox Broadcasting will sign former "Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien. The move will hinge in part on whether it can be cost-effective.

"We all like Conan," Ailes said. "It's an arithmetic problem."

Additionally, Ailes is chairman and CEO of Fox Business Network, which he launched 21/2 years ago as a challenge to NBC Universal's CNBC, which he turned into a moneymaker back in the 1990s. He believes Fox Business is less than two years from the black.

I only wish our home's Comcast carried Fox Business or I'd be watching that too....! It is simply amazing how the state-controlled news networks and dead-tree papers are losing eyeballs and readers while the News Corp.'s Fox network and cable eat the opposition alive, with the exception of CBS on the nets. American Idol and several other creative programs like Fringe and Human Target keep coming up with great TV fare, and the cable news commentators are the only ones to challenge the DNC talking point version of political events that the stenographer nets like ABC, NBC & CBS plus CNN & the MessNBC trainwreck peddles shamelessly as "news." Someone should instruct them on the difference between editorial comment and news content, since the ole-timey nets keep peddling hooey and losing viewers.

Living fossil Howard Raines makes even more of a fool of himself than when he hired Jason LNU to file stories made up of whole cloth. Get what this shit-canned failure has to say:

Former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, in a March 14 Washington Post essay, asked, "Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration?"

Ailes is dismissive of Raines ("All the other channels apparently give him what he wants," he said) and even more so of the notion that Fox News has not faced criticism.

"That's hysterical," Ailes said. "Fox has taken more incoming; we have a bigger bull's-eye on us than anybody. What he's upset about is we haven't been hit." Obama, whose administration took flak from other news operations last year when it tried to isolate Fox News, last week sat for an interview with the channel's Bret Baier.

Of course, the nets and cable clowns who dutifully parrot the Obama Party Line like Agitpreppie halfwits have been blowing whistles and finger-pointing Fox News for years, only to see Ailes' handiwork rise in the ratings until the Fox cable evening prime time laps ALL FOUR opponents at once, frequently pulling in double what the lame-o quarterwits at CNN & MessNBC can muster in an evening.

Now Howell can go back to his uneasy retirement and experience hysterical foam-at-the-mouth brain seizures as the Wall Street Journal gains paid subscriptions way over 2 million daily while the fishwrap birdcage lining he used to edit sinks below 800K a day toward flatline city.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving exit of an NYT alimentary canal.