Listen to Media Matters' Angelo Carusone explain how Fox News is planning to raise your cable bill
Published
Listen to Media Matters' Angelo Carusone explain how Fox News is planning to raise your cable bill
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From the August 9, 2023, edition of Sirius XM's The Dean Obeidallah Show
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Fox News' ratings are down. I mean, revenue is down. And I will just put a bullet on there that part of the Tucker thing embedded in this is that they were really having trouble making money on Tucker's show. Like, despite the fact that they were saying it didn't matter, they actually were.
They couldn't sell ads on the show, and that adds up over time, but it's your, like you noted, your biggest host who's making, you know, has 3.5, 4,500,000 viewers. It's just you -- they weren't able to really make money on the show. They were leaving a lot of money on the table; that compounds.
But the thing that we've talked about aside from their advertising revenue going down, which is significant -- is that they also lost revenue with affiliate fees, which is these carriage fees. That is because of two things. One, it's cord cutting. And one of the things that we've taught here -- the way it works is that every cable company pays a small fee for every customer that they have to have a TV channel.
That's how everybody, you know, that's how cable channels get to provide cable companies get to provide TV channels. That's how the TV channels make a little bit of money. Fox charges a lot. Fox News charges a lot of money for in order to for to be carried. That's how they offset their losses.
They're the second most expensive channel of everybody's cable bill. Because of cord cutting, which, you know, everybody's getting rid of their cable, it's happening. That means that the money they would get from that would go down naturally cause there's less viewers.
Fox's plan has always been in this year to increase by a very significant amount, the amount of money that cable companies pay to carry Fox News. That would not only offset losses from people cord cutting, but that would actually radically increase their revenue because they were trying to go up by 70¢ or a dollar, which is a lot.
They haven't been able to do it, so they were supposed to by now. They were supposed to have two -- three of their major cable companies were supposed to renew already. We would have we would have seen the first earnings from the result of that increase already now in this report that just came out.
Well guess what? They didn't do it. They have not negotiated a new contract yet, which should have happened three months ago. They're still at a standstill. This is -- this never happens for Fox.