FOX NEWS NEEDS PUBLIC SUPPORT AGAINST DISH

BREAKING: Very Bad News for Fox News… They Need Public Support

Friday, January 2nd, 2015

As 21st Century Fox continues to battle with Dish Network Corp. over the fees paid to keep the Fox News Channel on the DISH satellite network, Fox just took a serious blow.

Serious, but not deadly. Fox saw a significant drop in ratings during the week of Dec. 28, the first full week in which the “fair and balanced” network was absent from DISH’s offerings.

Fox News averaged 939,000 prime-time viewers that week, a 12 percent drop from the same week in 2013 and about a 40 percent drop from the previous week’s 1.65 million viewer average, according to Nielsen Media data cited by International Business Times.

The week-to-week change is not terribly significant, as viewership over the holidays typically drops.

But the 12 percent drop from last year’s numbers is likely attributable to the programming not being available on DISH, which owns about a 13.4 percent share of the subscription-television market.

But there is a bit of good news for Fox, according to IBD. Even with their lower numbers, Fox still had more total viewership than CNN and MSNBC combined for the week.

And while viewership was impacted among viewers 25-to-54 years old, a key demographic for news programming, the impact was less significant than among overall ratings.

Fox News viewers have been blasting DISH since the satellite television provider ceased carrying Fox News on Dec. 21, with some cancelling subscriptions or demanding refunds for the period in which Fox has been blacked out, even though DISH’s customer agreement allows the company to make any programming changes it wishes, IBD reported.

Both DISH and Fox have blamed the blackout on the other company, and neither company was willing to predict how long the blackout might continue.

But I’ll go ahead and get out on that limb and make my first prediction of 2015.

The blackout will last until enough DISH subscribers either cancel their service or make credible threats to do so. Fox News has a lot of viewer loyalty, whereas it’s hard to argue that DISH is offering anything other than a commodity service.

Most DISH customers can cancel their service and replace it with cable or another alternative.

But how is anyone expected to replace Megyn Kelly?