Fox chief: We're the real chicken-noodle network
Roger Ailes sure is making headlines this week. Besides gearing up for the 10th anniversary of Fox News Channel, which he took from obscurity to giant-killer in half that time, Ailes unmildly defended his "mild-mannered" reporter, Chris Wallace, over that dustup with President Clinton, saying that an assault on Wallace is an assault on all journalists.
Leaving aside whether a $14,000-a-year camera-slinging reporter in Lubbock feels a sense of solidarity with Mike Wallace's privileged kid, both of these stories are more like pseudo-news. Nothing changes because they happened. But what's going on between Ailes and the cable companies who carry Fox News -- now that's news.
Fox News is demanding a huge increase in subscriber fees,
the amount that cable providers pay for the right to carry channels.
It's an increase Ailes feels Fox News is entitled to, seeing as how
it's been spanking CNN in the ratings for five years, and CNN charges
cable operators a lot more money.
You may recall my story from this summer at press tour, when Ailes told a reporters' scrum
that he was getting by on a much smaller budget than CNN. (That second
link is to an MP3 file.) At the time I assumed it was because Rupert
Murdoch wasn't giving him the money, and Ailes replied that no, other
networks just waste more money than he does. Anyway, he said, "We'll be
fine."
But as it turns out, Fox is not "fine" operating on a smaller budget
than CNN, which was once derisively called the "chicken noodle network"
for its low-rent look and feel before going on to become a cash cow for
Ted Turner, later Time Warner. Now, Fox wants to be paid. If it can
get paid CNN money, and starts to invest in newsgathering on a CNN
scale, then CNN is really done for.
I think Fox can get paid. I remember back in 1998 taking phone
calls from readers wanting to know why their cable system wouldn't add
Fox News Channel. They said Fox didn't do that "biased news." They
couldn't see it. But they knew. And they were willing to switch from
cable to satellite to get it. My guess is, they still are. Say, who
owns DirecTV anyway? Oh, that's right ...
