Fox News
|
Fox News Channel (FNC), commonly referred to as Fox or Fox News, is a cable and satellite news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation. As of April 2009, it is available to 102 million households in the United States and further to viewers internationally, broadcasting primarily out of its New York City studios.
The channel was created by Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who hired Roger Ailes as its founding CEO. The channel was launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers. The network slowly rose to prominence in the late 1990s. In terms of regular viewers (Nielsen ratings), Fox News rates as the United States' most watched cable news network, ahead of CNN and MSNBC. Many observers have asserted that both Fox's news reporting and its political commentary promote conservative political positions. Fox News Channel denies any bias in its news reporting and maintains that its political commentary and news reporting operate independently of each other.
In May 1985, Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch announced that he and American industrialist and philanthropist Marvin Davis intend to develop "a network of independent stations as a fourth marketing force" to compete directly with CBS, NBC and ABC through the purchase of six television stations then owned by Metromedia. In July 1985, 20th Century Fox announced that publisher Rupert Murdoch had completed his purchase of 50 percent of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent company of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. A year later, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. earned $5.6 million in its fiscal third period ended May 31, 1986, in contrast to a loss of $55.8 million in the year-earlier period.
Prior to founding FNC, Murdoch had gained significant experience in the 24-hour news business when News Corp.'s BSkyB subsidiary started Europe's first 24-hour news channel, Sky News, in the United Kingdom in 1989. With the success of his fourth network efforts in the United States,[14][15] experience gained from Sky News, and turnaround of 20th Century Fox, Murdoch announced on January 31, 1996 that News Corp. would be launching a 24-hour news channel to air on both cable and satellite systems as part of a News Corp. "worldwide platform" for Fox programming, reasoning that "The appetite for news — particularly news that explains to people how it affects them — is expanding enormously."
In February 1996, after former US Republican Party political strategist and NBC executive Roger Ailes left America's Talking (now MSNBC), Murdoch called him to start the Fox News Channel. Ailes worked individuals through five months of 14-hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before launch, on October 7, 1996. |
fox-news
