The Early Days of Fox: Losing Money to Gain Political Power

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Conservative commentator Brit Hume noted, in a 1999 interview with PBS, “This operation [Fox News] loses money. It doesn’t lose nearly as much as it did at first, and it’s—well, it’s hit all its projections in terms of, you know, turning a profit, but it’s—it will lose money now, and we expect for a couple more years. I think it’s losing about $80 million to $90 million a year.”

But that loss wasn’t viewed by these right-wing billionaires as a “loss”—rather, it was an investment.

It’s what Reverend Moon believed, as his Washington Times newspaper lost hundreds of millions of dollars but spread right-wing perspectives that influenced the nation. It’s how the Koch brothers have referred to the hundreds of millions they shower on right-wing politicians and causes. And it’s what the people who started Air America Radio believed, although they couldn’t get big funders to understand the stakes.

While Rupert Murdoch lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Air America’s bankruptcy was for $14 million) in its first few years, Murdoch hung on and kept pouring in the cash. And it put George W. Bush in the White House, according to several independent analyses.

As Richard Morin wrote for the Washington Post in 2006, asking rhetorically, “Does President Bush owe his controversial win in 2000 to Fox cable television news?”18 The answer was an emphatic “Yes!” according to academics who did exhaustive research into what they called “the Fox Effect.”

As Morin reported:

“‘Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion effect,’ said Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkely [sic] and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.”

In Florida alone, they estimate, the Fox Effect may have produced more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush— clearly a decisive factor in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes.

The analysis looked at the vote from 1996 to 2004 in 9,256 American cities and towns where Fox was available on basic cable.

“They found,” reported Morin, “clear evidence of a Fox Effect among non-Republicans in the presidential and Senate races, even after controlling for other factors including vote trends in similar nearby towns without access to Fox.” The researchers added that “the Fox effect seems to [be] permanent and may be increasing.” And that was in 2006.

This is problematic, because no democracy can survive intact when only one voice or political perspective overwhelmingly dominates any major branch of the media.

Literally hundreds of right-wing talk show hosts, both local and national, are broadcasting every day, all day, in every town and city in America.

Progressive voices, on the other hand, are few and far between; in most parts of America (and virtually all of rural America), the only radio signal that carries any progressive programming whatsoever is SiriusXM, which requires a subscription and special receiver—costs that are hard to bear among voters in the reddest states where Republican policies have destroyed unions and exported jobs overseas, thus lead- ing to widespread poverty.

Jefferson made his comment about newspapers being vital to America just at the time he was being most viciously attacked in the newspapers. The core requisite of democracy is debate. When there’s only a single predominant voice in the media, American democracy itself is at greatest risk, be that voice on the right or the left.

It’s time to enforce antitrust in our media landscape and to bring back media ownership rules that both limit the number of outlets and prioritize local ownership.