The Long And Short Of It Is: Cut The Cord

Fox News wants a massive increase in its cable fees — which will be paid for by all cable subscribers https://t.co/LNCKqwH5e7

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 23, 2023

Per S&P Global, there are approximately 61.9 million multichannel video subscribers, including cable, satellite, and other delivery service providers. If Fox is collecting $2.18 from each of them, as is their current affiliate fee rate, that’s over $1.3 billion in revenue. If that rate goes up to $3 per subscriber, Fox News would be earning more than $1.8 billion from affiliate revenue alone — mostly from customers who don’t watch the channel and have no desire to fund the network’s defamation settlement. 

This means that Fox has every incentive to ramp up its extremism, rather than attempt to moderate it.

 I am assuming FoxNews, like NYT or any paywalled website, doesn’t stream its broadcasts to non-subscribers. So all those people posting original clips of Tucker and Hannity, etc., are supporting Murdoch to do so.

I know many of these websites and Twitter fora are among my favorites. But unless they’re getting access for free, they’re supporting the same network they want shut down.

These fees are the majority of revenue for Fox, more even than advertising, and they are significantly higher than those charged by the network’s competitors. Fox has been able to raise prices and charge disproportionately high rates due to its history of deceptive and aggressive negotiating tactics during contract renewal talks with providers

Dominion was never going to shutter FoxNews. Neither will Smartmatic. AOC is right. We can’t expect the courts to solve these problems for us; contrary to her solution, however, we can’t expect government to do it either, because that will come back to the courts, and the First Amendment. No, the solution is with us. We have to starve the beast.

The consumer base for cable and satellite is shrinking. The most effective attack on FoxNews is to shrink that base further. Paying for cable in order to get content for your website is simply supporting FoxNews.

If that means anything to you.