Dan Kennedy:
Liberal activists have pressured advertisers from time to time, which is well within their own free-speech rights. But Fox, in particular, is all but immune from such pressure because most of its money comes from cable carriage fees. As Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of the liberal media-watch organization Media Matters for America, recently told the public radio program ‘On the Media’:
“They can have zero commercials and still have a 90% profit margin because they are the second most expensive channel on everybody’s cable box, and Fox is in the process right now of renegotiating 40 to 50% of all of their contracts.”
I had not considered it this way, but the argument is basically that everyone with a cable package is subsidizing Fox News to some extent. We talk about this in relation to ESPN a lot (which makes sense as it’s the most expensive channel), but presumably there are even more people who would viscerally not want to help bankroll Fox News.
The cable bundle continues to dwindle over time, but now the newer players, like YouTube TV, which I use, are rising up to fill the void. The product is better — namely, that you can watch it anywhere — but the model is still largely the same. It does feel like we’re working our way towards a la carte — Discovery+ being perhaps the best example yet — but it’s cumbersome (so many apps!) and expensive.
Still, it’s interesting to think about what happens to Fox News if the cable bundle goes away (or becomes predominantly a sports bundle). One assumes they’d do well as a stand-alone entity with monthly subs coming in directly from viewers. They certainly won’t go away, as other players in the bundle would. But do they do as well as they are in our bundled world? Do advertiser boycotts start to actually matter?
