I have a piece coming out Tues in BigLeaguePolitics about the turmoil in the entertainment/news universe.
Fox has a “repurchase” stock price of $4.9b right now.
FILMS at Fox dropped by $1b last year, from $9.5 to 8.5b, but still comprise 31% of Fox revenue.
TELEVISION (including sports and FNC) grew very slightly (mostly due to sports) from $4.89 to 5.1b, but FELL as a share of Fox’s overall revenues from 19% to 17%.
Overall, Fox’s stock price dropped from $37.7 a share in 2014 to $24 in 2016.
Against this backdrop, the Murdoch boys are jockeying the news division. They can’t any longer subsidize it with Films. And sporting event fees-—MLB and NFL-—are rising. Fox’s biggest source of revenues is cable.
So if the Murdoch boys want to “leftify” FNC so they are more accepted at dinner parties, they can. FNC’s revenue loss would be a minimal cost.
Meanwhile, as I show in the piece, FNC came out almost a decade after Fox Television started. The path they used to roll this out was brilliant, starting just one, then two nights a week. Just think of that: to follow the same model a news organization would have to be solvent for ten years, or have enough capital to allow it to run for many years without a profit as it built share. FNC did not surpass CNN until 2002, 16 years after starting.
Once the "boys" took over, they began to ruin the N.Y. Post and completely ruin FNC...as the Post hangs on by its fingertips, to still sort of being a kind of, Conservative paper.
It has taken the boys far LESS time to DESTROY the Murdoch empire, than it took the "old man" to build it up to where it once was and stayed! And they are staring through a hole in the bottom of the barrel as it is.
This is NOT all about stupid lefty dinner parties...it has a LOT to do with a second attempt to buy SKY NEWS, which will NEVER happen now, due to some of the same factors, but even MORE to do with their abject, mordant stupidity in losing viewers, sponsors, and ratings in the drain of an over used public toilet.