Some recent ratings news no doubt gladdened the hearts of Fox News Channel haters.
First, Nielsen Media Research reported that Fox News' overall prime-time lineup dropped 17% last month compared with a year ago (MSNBC grew 16% during the same period, while CNN plummeted by 38%).
Late last week, a reliable television industry website, TVNewser.com, reported that in April, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly had his worst month in nearly five years among viewers age 25 to 54, the most coveted audience in TV news.
Although the network still churns out ratings light-years ahead of competitors' and O'Reilly remains cable news' No. 1 host, Fox News' explosive growth appears to be, like the president's 90% approval rating in the days following Sept. 11, a relic from the first Bush term.
That's the elephant in the room, of course -- the broadly assumed, and occasionally documented, affinity between Fox News and the current administration (Vice President Dick Cheney's office prepared a hotel checklist, recently posted on TheSmokingGun.com, that ordered "all televisions tuned to Fox News" during Cheney visits). Could it be mere coincidence that O'Reilly, populist scourge of both Clintons and countless left-wing causes, is seeing his still-formidable nightly audience of 2.1 million or so start to shrink in tandem with the Bush/GOP's rapidly fading grip on the electorate?
O'Reilly's thoroughly delighted rivals think not.
"When the stock market was through the roof in the '90s, people used to sit around and watch CNBC and slap high fives and say, 'I made another hundred bucks today!' " said MSNBC host and O'Reilly foe Keith Olbermann, adding that CNBC's ratings quickly went south when the tech bubble burst.
"I think the same psychology applies to Fox. They'll always have their hard-core audience that wants to hear, 'Everything's great! [Bush is] doing a great job.' " But less-partisan viewers are drifting away, Olbermann argued.
Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, agrees. "Maybe this is part of the deal with the devil you make when a supposed news network allies itself so closely with one point of view," he said.
To be fair and balanced here: Olbermann's "Countdown" competes head to head with "The O'Reilly Factor" and the two hosts have been engaged in a months-long feud. Although Olbermann's ratings climbed 35% last month, his total audience remains less than one-fourth the size of O'Reilly's.
