UK’s Guardian newspaper writes about Fox News as it relates to New Corp.’s attempt to purchase BskyB.
The article starts out by examining the power of FNC through a positive lens:
The average Fox News viewer is a male between the ages of 30 to 49 – far from most people’s perception that mostly seniors watch Fox. So where Seddon pointed to a fabled minority audience of “not-so-bright … American citizens”, Fox is instead popular among a wide swath of well-educated, contributing members of society. Fox’s audience includes your neighbour, your cousin and the guy in front of you in line every morning at Starbucks.
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Update: It isn’t clear where the author got her numbers, but they do not seem to be correct. The median age for men watching FNC is 63, and is 65 for women according to Nielsen. FNC does have more 25-54 year old viewers than the other networks, but as a percentage of its total audience, it still skews older.
Mostly however, the Guardian story is not so nice:
Fox’s pre-eminent position has had an irrefutable and destructive impact on the state of political discourse in the United States. Since its inception, Fox News has performed as a political party, not as an objective journalistic outlet. Since President Obama took office, Fox has succeeded not only in spreading misinformation and lies, but also in entrenching those fictions so that its audience relates to them as irrefutable fact.