The Fox News network has earned a very distinctive reputation since it first went on the air in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton. It was quickly identified as being blatantly biased for the Republican Party and Conservatives in general. The network was quick to start using the “fair and balanced” slogan in an attempt to redeem the overall image – though, this was a miserable lie.
Fox News today seems to be the punchline for many jokes. It is perceived as being a biased, bought out and largely dishonest network watched mostly by aging people who have little contact with the real world. It turns out that recent television statistics seem to be confirming what most people perceive about the Fox News viewing base. The average age of Fox News viewers is 68 during prime time programming, which is older than any other cable or broadcast news channel. Fox has actually been embracing this statistic lately by catering programs and news stories to older Americans who are afraid of a diverse and tolerant country.
Another problem that Fox News is facing is the overall diversity of the viewership. Barely 2 percent of the people who watch Fox News are black or a minority, which means 98 percent of the viewers of Fox are white. This is by far the lowest percentage of minority viewers of any news program on the air today. The demographics of the Fox News viewer base have allowed the network to maintain relatively high ratings for a cable news network. Fox is the one central place where older white Christian Conservatives can go to get news that is agreeable instead of factual.
Fox regularly feeds into the fear, paranoia and bigotry of many of the viewers. The network airs segments that degrade minorities, Muslims, women, the gay community and transgendered people. Fox brings on guests with controversial, ignorant and hateful views. Fox has also managed to convince the loyal viewers that nearly every other media outlet is a lying, Liberal organization bent on destroying the country, in this way viewers stick to Fox News and distrust anything else even when facts are clearly presented.
Fox has seen a steady and gradual decline in viewers over the years. Younger people and millennials tend to be more diverse, tolerant and informed than the people Fox tries to target. Only around a third of millennials identify as Republican leaving the vast majority as Democrats or Independents. This is not just bad for Fox News – it is bad news for the Republican Party as a whole. It is hard to forget the famous post-mortem report that Reince Priebus put together after the Republicans lost the White House in 2012:
The report talked about how the party needs to change, and pointed out that Republicans need to draw in younger people and become a more diverse party. Failure to do this would mean the Republican Party might slowly wither and die… Unfortunately, Donald Trump showed up and ruined any chance of Republican outreach by waging a campaign based on bigotry and alienating as many groups as possible. Both Fox News and the Republican Party seem to be slowly shrinking and fading into irrelevance as the country progresses without them. If this trend continues then we may eventually be living in an America without the kind of absurd and hateful policies and ideas presented by media outlets like fox… Maybe dreams can actually come true.