Cable News dominates TV news, and thus drives the political agenda. And Fox dominates cable news.
That's the considered opinion of Glenn Garvin, the veteran TV critic for The Miami Herald, who takes apart the claims of broadcast TV.
Here's part of Glenn's argument, in which he demolishes the wishful thinking of Eric Boehlert,a liberal media gadfly :
As for the Fox-News-is-dead school of thought, of which lefty pundit Eric Boehlert was the primary exponent, consider the year-to-date Nielsen numbers: Fox News is not only the highest-rated cable-news network all day long, but, during prime time, the fourth-most popular channel in all of cable. (CNN is 19th; MSNBC 27th.) Its average prime-time audience of 1.8 million is almost as big as that of the other two cable news channels combined.
Why the dominance of cable? Lots of reasons, but one big reason is the ubiquity of cable: It's always on. Sort of like a dial tone. And if not the TV, then the web. Tom Shales, the TV critic for The Washington Post, elaborates, in his own quirky liberal way, about multimedia:
We don't watch television; instead, we access program material through content providers. Viewers accustomed to the cellphone and iPod and DVR and OnDemand don't watch TV the way earlier generations did. We don't even receive it the way our foreviewers did, via the old cathode-ray tube-in-a-box. TV now seeps into our lives through hand-held gadgets and laptops, on "webisodes" and YouTube snippets and fragmented downloads.
The Cable Gamer believes that the next network for news already exists: It will be built on TV, on the Net, and will be distributed in a thousand ways to a thousand different kinds of machines. But someone will come along to connect all those dots. And then, behold! that will be the new paradigm of news.
