FOX News at 10

Accuracy in Media has a nice column on Fox News's tenth anniversary. As much as leftists hate FOX, it certainly has filled a niche in cable news, giving conservatives a channel to watch that doesn't send blood pressures soaring.

As Cliff Kincaid notes, FOX News isn't conservative. FOX comes much closer to playing the news straight than other news organizations. What most liberals dislike about FOX News is its nightly lineup of talk shows. It's easy to understand why The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes, and On the Record with Greta Von Susteren would cause liberals to grind their teeth. O'Reilly, which plays opposite Keith Olbermann's show, gets about 4 to 5 times the viewers of Mr. "Worst Person in the World."

Why is FOX News so popular among cable news watchers? It's certainly not because FOX is necessarily any more accurate than MSNBC or CNN. At least one study shows that cable news is "measurably thinner than the other forms of national television news studied. Its stories are more one-sided and have fewer sources, and audiences are told less about those sources than in network evening or morning news or PBS." And while viewers tend to think they are getting news all day, this study showed that the cable news networks just recycled the same stories throughout the day with little new information added.

In other words, while FOX trounces its opposition in viewership, the news quality of its journalism is still nothing to be excited about. Looks to me like FOX should have a new goal for its next decade: put a little more news on its channel and a little less opinion.