The Classic Liberal Blog

Ben Cohen, editor of The Daily Banter.com, shows off his um, business acumen, in today's Huffington Post.

Why Rupert Murdoch Will Fire Glenn Beck

Rupert Murdoch is a smart man. In the U.K, Murdoch aligns his newspapers with the popular political party and helps them enact their policies by giving them favorable coverage.

In short, Murdoch doesn't care about Left or Right. He cares about money.

In the United States, his news channel is doing just about everything it can to irritate the current President, and it is beginning to effect his business.

When news show host Glenn Beck explicitly called Barack Obama a racist, it caused a media hailstorm and an advertising exodus from his show that reached as far as the U.K (Beck's show is broadcast on Murdoch's 'Sky News' channel). On a recent political talk show tour, President Obama sat down with 5 networks none of which were Fox.

While Glenn Beck is not the lone voice of dissent within Fox News (O'Reilly, Hannity and Malkin are similarly offensive), he does epitomize what is wrong with the network, and just how out of sync it is with the mainstream.

Advertisers pulling their brands from Beck's show is a signal that there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. It is a warning to Fox that their bottom line will be effected if it continues to promote such hateful speech, and that a growing cross section of the public are turning their backs on the Fox brand.

And the bottom line for Murdoch is that he cannot tolerate it for long.

So Murdoch, "a smart man," is going to fire one of his biggest hits? Get real. Beck has increased Fox's ratings in that time-slot by 136%. That's huge! From TVNEWSER:

If you've been following the cable news ratings, and we know you have, you'll know Fox News has been dominating, even more than usual, in 2009. In the just-finished third quarter, Fox News beat CNN and MSNBC combined in Total Viewers and the A25-54 demo in both total day and primetime viewing. FNC is also the only cable news network to post across the board gains vs. Q3 '08.

FNC had the top 10 programs in cable news.

Cohen claims that "a growing cross section of the public are turning their backs on the Fox brand," yet the ratings tell a completely different story. Let me help you here Mr. Cohen, when ratings go up, that means more people are turning on Fox News, not less.

In other words, Fox News is more popular than any of the other news channels.

With the ratings that Beck is pulling in, Murdoch can afford to lose a few sponsors. Because that many more will line-up to advertise on the show. and pay higher prices to boot!

Murdoch has proven his marketing foresight by signing Glenn Beck. It's obvious that promoting President Obama and the Democrats isn't a successful strategy. They simply aren't as popular as you seem to think. In fact, if you look at the ratings of all the other networks who do kowtow to Obama, you'll find further proof that Obama and the Democrats aren't that popular, by looking at their declining ratings.

Markets work. And in this case, people are voting with their remote controls ... and it's not Obama and the Democrats for whom they're voting.

More from JammieWearingFool:

HuffPost Fantasy-land: Murdoch Will Fire Glenn Beck

Despite some lame boycott organized by pals of Communist Truther Van Jones, Glenn Beck's ratings continue to soar, even in the typically dead 5 pm hour. But leave it to some delusional Huffington Post hater to live in an alternate universe and claim Rupert Murdoch will soon fire Beck. Sure, and the New York Mets are a lock to get to the World Series.

What planet are these people living on?

Seems to me the rest of the low-rated cable networks are the ones out of the mainstream. After all, Beck crushes them all combined during his timeslot. But hey, why deal with facts

Talk about out of touch. These uber left-wing radicals are simply nuts! It's no wonder why they hate business ... They don't understand how it works!