It isn’t exactly a secret that cable news viewers skew old, sometimes very old. Fox News Channel happens to have the oldest audience of the “big three” cable news channels. Considering that advertisers typically buy demographics, the older viewers of cable news should be a problem for ad sales… and indeed they are, however, as the New York Times Bill Carter notes, it isn’t necessarily the be all and end all.
Fox News one of the highest per-subscriber fees in television, 94 cents a month, topped in cable television only by a few networks, most of which have expensive sports rights to pay. (By comparison, CNN gets 57 cents a subscriber, according to SNL Kagan Research.) As Mr. Moffett put it, “There are a handful of networks consumers are deeply passionate about out of all proportion to Nielsen ratings, and distributors know if you don’t have those networks, then woe be to you.”
Further, FNC is planning a major revamp of its schedule later this year, when Megyn Kelly joins the channel’s primetinme lineup, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck joins “Fox & Friends.” They bring a considerably younger worldview to FNC’s lineup, which has remained more or less unchanged for years.