The time slot doesn't really matter. What matters is that the people who are getting their news/opinion from O’Reilley may not then bother to tune in to Couric. That reduces the influence that the network news has on public opinion. its hardly a surprise 0bama's approval ratings collapsed in just a year, the Democrats have lost NJ, VA and MA, despite the network news people, being a propaganda department for 0bama and the Democrats.
“But, whatever FNC is taking from the networks is only a TINY fraction of the viewers that network news has lost the last 20 years. “
Add up the 3 million from Beck through to the 4 million for O'Reilley, 2.8 million for Hannity, plus Greta, plus the daytime Fox news programs, and assume that different people are watching Fox news at different times, and Fox news will parable trump any of the 6:30 network news programs in total viewership on a regular basis.
When there is breaking news, and people turn on the TV, they are likely to turn to one of the cable news programs rather than the networks. The way things are going, with Fox news making ,ore profits than all the 3 network news combined, the cable news programs are gradually going to have the network news programs for lunch.
If you're going to add the prime-time numbers and compare them to the network's news number, then you also have to add in the network morning news numbers. From TVNewser on the network evening broadcast ratings from the week of Feb. 8...
ABC.....9,240,000
NBC....11,050,000
CBS.....7,090,000
And, from that same period for cable news, again from TVNewser and measuring average daily and unique viewers...
P2+ Total Day
FNC – 1,460,000 viewers,
CNN – 479,000 viewers
MSNBC –389,000 viewers
CNBC – 176,000 viewers
HLN –337,000 viewers
While FNC is a very successful cable network, the numbers don't lie. They still only represent but a fraction of the combined network news coverage, and they account for even a smaller percentage of total lost network viewers over the last 20 years. People didn't stop watching broadcast news (and reading papers, for that matter) because of "media bias". They stopped watching because they were dead.