Fair & Balanced? Fox Should Counter-Program MSNBC’s GOP Morning Joe with Three Hours of Olbermann

art-olbermann-at-foxDoes Fox News need credibility? In one sense, no — no more than Pravda needed credibility when it was the Communist Party’s main propaganda outlet in the Soviet days.

On the other hand, Fox’s audience is shrinking. It lost 21 percent of all viewers and 26 percent of younger viewers in the year ending last September.

There’s evidence that a corollary loss in credibility may be driving the shrinkage. A poll from PPP released last week found that Fox’s rating on trustworthiness dropped 16 percentage points in the past 12 months.

Another factor: Fox viewers have a median age of 65. Its audience is literally dying off.

While Fox is best known as a GOP propaganda mill, it plays a crucial, lesser known role in the Rupert Murdoch media empire. Profits from Fox prop up Murdoch’s vanity project, the New York Post, which operates with annual losses said to be at least $30 million.

If Murdoch wanted to expand Fox’s audience base beyond old, white Republicans, he would find the network well-position to transform itself in the current environment.

Both of Fox’s competitors are undergoing restructuring. CNN is as weak as it has ever been, and Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal, which includes MSNBC, is in flux.

But the biggest obstacle preventing Fox from taking more market share is its too-cozy relationship with the GOP. The network will never connect with a wider audience of normal Americans as long as it continues to narrowcast to elderly conservatives. Fox will continue to shred its credibility, and therefore shed ratings, as long as it keeps its current all-right wing lineup in place.

So here’s an out-of-the-box, if not off-the-wall, suggestion. Why not put Keith Olbermann on after Bill O’Reilly?

Or better yet, give Keith a three-hour morning show opposite Republican Joe Scarborough on MSNBC.

Nothing underscores the stark contrast between MSNBC’s legitimacy as a news organization and Fox’s status as a propaganda channel than the fact that MSNBC broadcasts “Morning Joe,” hosted by Gingrich Revolution-era former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough for three hours in the morning against “Fox and Friends,” one of the worst shows on television — and the one show on Fox on which the hosts are so dimwitted that they may actually believe the disinformation and spin they spew.

What a perfect place to put Olbermann. Get rid of the current three hosts. Give Olbermann a cohost, say Randi Rhodes or Stephanie Miller, and a sidekick — David Shuster, obviously — and you have got a show.

Right. Never gonna happen. And this just proves the point. MSBNC gives a self-obsessed, loud-mouth establishment Republican three hours live in the morning. Fox has no liberal hosts whatsoever.

What is “equivalent” about that?

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