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by aschearer 696 days ago
I mean if direct influence is the metric -- Fox has low millions according to Google. What do you think, 5 million people in a year under Murdoch's "direct" influence? Looks like Taylor Swift sold 4.35 million concert tickets in her latest tour. So who has more influence? Hard to say, in my opinion. We'd have to start unpacking the content of the information being propagated. How much of the information is novel? How receptive to new information is the audience? What is more impactful a news segment or a lyric? Seems impossible.

Or going about this another way, who was more influential: Hearst/Pulitzer or Freud? In my view, Freud flipped the world on its head meanwhile the other two are simply "yellow journalism."

2 comments

5 million fox viewers is not how the power behind the throne is measured.

It sounds awful to put it this way, but all US citizens, Uk citizens, Australian live in his aftermath.

The Fox News model is now replicated globally, because it is so politically successful.

You're underestimating the reach of Fox News by a couple orders of magnitude. I think you misinterpreted an instantaneous measurement as an annual number.

"Tucker Carlson Tonight" was averaging 3.2 million live viewers every single night. If the average viewer watched his show once per week, that's 15 million different households watching per week. Clips from the show also get watched on Youtube, social media, blogs, etc. And that's just one show.

Fox News is the defacto news source for the majority of Republican-voting Americans. They play a massive role in deciding which stories get coverage and how the narratives about those stories get defined.