For years, I have been wondering why there’s not a competing conservative cable news channel to Fox. Wouldn’t a non-shouting conservative channel be great?
Like virtually every other conservative I know, I watch FNC holding my nose. The non-stop shouting is awful. The best hour in their lineup is Special Report with Bret Baier. Why? Because it’s hard news, cogent analysis, and no shouting.
Imagine a conservative news channel that had, say, someone like Charles Krauthammer doing a Charlie Rose-type show, an hour of extended, civil discussion on a topic.
In any other realm of capitalism, when one brand (FNC) so completely dominates the market, the competitors being left in the dust ask themselves “What are they doing that we aren’t?” They then make efforts to replicate the market dominator’s characteristics. But, being how entrenched liberalism in the media world is, we aint’s about to see CNN (for example) turn conservative.
So why hasn’t an entrepreneur or big conglomerate created a second conservative news channel? FNC’s dominance (often with a market share bigger than its competitors combined) obviously indicates there’s a supply-demand imbalance.
Glenn Beck’s The Blaze channel has promise and is on the path to being a certified (satellite-provider) news channel.
Today, we learn that founder of Newsmax plans a network to be slightly to the left of FNC:
The founder of the conservative media company Newsmax is planning to launch a cable TV network to compete with Fox News, but not quite the same. Christopher Ruddy wants to launch Newsmax TV later this year, and is billing it as a “kinder, gentler Fox” that will be “more information-based rather than being vituperative and polarizing.”
Bloomberg Businessweek’s profile of Ruddy notes that he himself isn’t a Republican and is “more moderate” than you might expect from the head of Newsmax. But Ruddy thinks there’s room in the cable landscape for a conservative competitor to Fox News, which hasn’t been done effectively to date.
It’s a start, I suppose.
