FBN rides politics, punch to cable ratings success
Fox Business News host Stuart Varney had covered a lot of ground about halfway through his three-hour show on Tuesday.
He talked with Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath about the NFL players’ national anthem protests, conferred with Newt Gingrich about the former House speaker’s new book, a thriller called Vengeance, the unlikelihood of tax reform and likelihood of tax cuts, and President Trump’s mistake in getting in a Twitter war with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.
During commercial breaks, Varney reads through the teleprompter script. An upcoming spot about ESPN’s suspension of host Jemele Hill is convoluted, he says. “Rewrite it,” Varney
commands. Another segment needs to get to the point more quickly. “Bang, hit it hard.”
“I should calm down, but first let me have more coffee,” Varney jokes.
The daily grind certainly isn’t bitter at Fox Business Network these days. The network, which
celebrates its 10th anniversary next week, touts robust Nielsen data showing it has won the business daytime slot — from the time the stock market opens at 9:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. ET (an hour after its close) — beating CNBC over the last four quarters. It has done it amid the ascension of Donald Trump into the White House and the distraction of sexual harassment scandals that reached the highest levels of Fox, which continues to deal with ongoing legal complaints about harassment and discrimination.
CNBC counters that it still wins across the 24-hour viewing period, the 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. segment and the 8 p.m to 11 p.m. period. And it also notes Nielsen does not capture out-of-home viewers — the financial firms and Wall Street offices that play the CNBC through the business day.
CNBC wields data from research firm Ipsos suggesting the network draws a more affluent and younger audience than Fox Business, and, overall 53% of the total business news viewership.
But there’s no denying Fox Business Network is on the rise, says Chris Roush, professor of business journalism at the University of North Carolina.
That could be, in part, because FBN is drafting on the success of conservative-friendly Fox News. Fox Business mixes more politics into its coverage than does CNBC, Roush said. “Given that the world has become much more political, it’s probably why its viewership has risen so much,” he said. “The more you have stories around Trump, the better your ratings.” “
Viewership of business networks may represent a slim slice of the overall TV viewing audience, but business news channels draw about $1 billion in annual ad revenue, according to Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“The ratings are important because we are a business, like any other cable network or broadcast network,” said Brian Jones, president of Fox Business News. “The fact is we are growing, and we are beating CNBC because we deliver a superior product, and we deliver a product that people need at a very, very important time.”
More than a decade after launching Fox News Channel, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes flipped the switch on the business news network. In its early days, there was plenty for FBN to cover. A troubled housing market begat the subprime mortgage crisis. Then came bailouts of the banking and auto industries and the Great Recession. “Talk about an auspicious beginning,”
“The fact is we are growing, and we are beating CNBC because we deliver a superior product, and we deliver a product that people need at a very, very important time.” Brian Jones, president of Fox Business News
said anchor Neil Cavuto, 59, who as senior vice president and managing editor oversaw business news coverage on Fox News prior to FBN’s launch.
Murdoch and Ailes bought into the idea of a network tackling business news differently, and the immediate financial crisis “reminded people there’s something bigger than stocks. There’s people’s homes,” said Cavuto, who migrated from CNBC in 1996. “We leapt at that and saw that for what it was and still do.”
Fox Business aimed to dispense with much of the jargon that accompanied business news. “I felt a network based on that approach of speaking English and reaching beyond ... touching the intersection of Washington and Wall Street would do well,” Cavuto said. “I felt that we just had to make this about average folks.”
Ratings-wise, the network struggled for years as its availability on pay-TV systems expanded. It began focusing on building a non-stop block of business day programming. It snagged Maria Bartiromo from CNBC in 2014 to anchor a morning show.
The network got another boost when it hosted a Republican primary debate in November 2015. Critics pilloried CNBC’s handling of its own Republican debate two weeks before and FBN’s Bartiromo and Cavuto, along with Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerald Baker, got better reviews.
“We focused on the issues,” Bartiromo said.
That debate broadcast set a ratings record for the network (13.5 million viewers), and a subsequent Republican debate in January 2016 was the night’s highest-rated show on cable.
Not all has been rosy, however. In July 2016, Ailes resigned two weeks after being sued for sexual harassment by former Fox & Friends host Gretchen Carlson. Ailes, who also ran Fox Business Network, left with a $40 million settlement, and Fox settled Carlson’s suit for a reported $20 million in September 2016. Ailes died in May.
That month, Bill Shine, who had been at Fox News since its start and was FBN co-president, also resigned, all part of a man- agement overhaul. Shine had been mentioned in several lawsuits filed against Fox News for allowing a workplace culture in which sexual harassment and racial discrimination developed. Shine’s departure came two weeks after popular Fox News host Bill O’Reilly was dismissed following an internal investigation into charges of sexual harassment against him.
When Ailes left, “this whole building was really confused and worried and saddened,” said anchor Liz Claman, a former CNBCer who joined FBN at its start. “I dreamed of this day when we were dancing on the tables saying we were No. 1 and imagined (saying), ‘Mr. Ailes, we did it.’ So that threw us off.”
After Shine’s departure, Jones, a veteran of the Fox News and FBN launches, was named FBN president, “so that calmed things, thankfully,” she said.
To some, the network’s gains have come by playing a game similar to that of fellow channel Fox News, hitching its star to candidate and now-President Trump and ignoring news that would hurt the president.
“I don’t think we are either pro- or anti-Trump,” Cavuto said. “I see a lot of things good that the president is doing, and I call him out when I see him do something that is a little damaging.”