Great insidery (and funny!) Michael Learmonth profile of Fox News Channel's Fox & Friends in Variety (subscription):
For "Fox & Friends" executive producer David Clark, it looks like the right time to ratchet up the guests and the stunts. "Any executive producer in the morning-show business is going over their game and looking at strategy because it's a time of turmoil and opportunity in morning news," he says.
The mornings are critical to cable news, both in terms of marketing dollars spent there and because good numbers set the tone for the rest of the day.
"If you don't do a good job at 6 a.m., you won't have as good a 7 and so on; it's a domino effect," Clark says.
FNC is riding a four-year streak at the top, averaging 944,000 viewers for the season, compared to 458,000 for CNN's "American Morning" and 319,000 for MSNBC's "Imus in the Morning." It's a fraction of "The Early Show's" 2.8 million, or "Today's" 6 million, but because the cable newsies are on a single feed, they only compete head-to-head in the East where they air three hours earlier in the West. The cable nets earn their numbers when just about a quarter of their aud is awake and watching TV.
All morning shows walk the sometimes jarring line between fluffy entertainment and news, but "Fox & Friends" takes it further than most as it tries to both out-hustle CNN, and out-entertain the network ayem competition. It's a high-wire act where the hosts ad-lib about 95% of the broadcast with innuendo-filled banter, while the control room keeps the news operation humming along.
Take an exchange on the topic of gardening. Hill, a tall, matter-of-fact Texan and mother of eight, asks if anyone remembers when they all brought in zucchinis. "Steve's was very big!" she quips.
Clark took over the show in October and moved it to Studio B -- a larger space to allow more demo segments and celebrity gymnastics. Prior to taking over the show, Clark was head of booking for the network, so naturally, his first priority was to bring up the quality of guests.
"I came from a hard-news background so my drive is it watch the competition and say, 'get it, get it, get it!' " he says.
Both sides of the show were in full view on a recent Tuesday morning when Clark threw out most of the show's planned segments and all of its guests to jump on the story of two kidnapped U.S. soldiers found dead outside of Baghdad.
Clark made the call to report the finding, based on a Reuters item, and then Baghdad-based correspondent Andrew Stack gave Fox the big scoop that the two privates had been brutally tortured.
A week earlier, FNC's Doocy broke the news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi initially survived the bomb attack that ultimately killed the terrorist.
"We were doing an interview with General Caldwell and he said, 'Oh by the way, he was alive,' " Doocy says. "Whoa, wait a minute! I thought two 500-pound bombs were going to slow you down. Well, he lingered for 52 minutes!"
During the broadcast, Clark keeps an eye on CNN, which he sees as his main competition for news; the more structured network shows are rarely in the breaking news hunt. For ratings, however, CNN is less and less a factor...
And just for fun, check out the video of the Wienermobile visiting Fox and Friends on Fox Fan Friday...
