Angelo Carusone on MSNBC: As Fox is in court, “the cable companies are going to have to decide whether or not they want to give Fox News significantly more money”
Carusone: Part of the reason Fox News makes as much money as they do is that they have the highest cable rates, carriage rates amongst any cable news channel and they're actually the second most expensive channel on everybody's cable bill.
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From the April 16, 2023, edition of MSNBC's The Mehdi Hasan Show
MEHDI HASAN (HOST): Angelo, you posted a fascinating thread on Twitter explaining something that's going on in the background of this Dominion trial: Fox's carriage renewal negotiations, aka how much money Fox makes from being on cable. Can you just very briefly explain to our viewers why this case could affect those negotiations? Why it matters so much to Fox's bottom line?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT AND CEO): Yeah, sure. Part of the reason why Fox News makes as much money as they do is that they have the highest cable rates, carriage rates amongst any cable news channel and they're actually the second most expensive channel on everybody's cable bill. ESPN is number one, basic cable. And that's because basically after Glenn Beck got fired for losing all of his advertisers, Fox News had this sort of shift in their business model, and they didn't want to be a commercial TV channel that was sort of beholden to what was commercially viable, what advertisers wanted. So they sort of leveraged their audience to sort of call their cable companies all the time. They lied to their audiences. They would say, “Your cable company is about to take Fox News away from you. They're taking us away, they're censoring us, they're part of the liberal agenda. You better call.” And basically, for the last decade, Fox News has been getting their audience to increase everybody in the country's cable rates by artificially inflating the demand for Fox News. This has nothing to do with viewership. It's everything to do with this sort of energy that they're [UNINTELLIGIBLE] --
HASAN: And if they lose this trial, if they lose this case, that's going to affect those negotiations surely?
CARUSONE: Yeah. Oh without a doubt. The negotiations are happening this month. The same time that they're going to be in court, the cable companies are going to have to decide whether or not they want to give Fox News significantly more money. It's going to be tough sell, ice skating uphill.