6 Year-Old `Fox News` Beats CNN

America’s special news cable broadcasters CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC are in a fierce competition. 6 year-old Fox News channel has been outrunning CNN, which has 22 years of tradition, in audience rating at major time period. The number of auditors during the major time period, from 8 p.m. to midnight, marks average 1,091,000 every day. Although CNN has 9 million registered households more than Fox News, the audience rating only reached 921,000 viewers. MSNBC marked 358,000. Fox News also outran the other two broadcasters in an audience rating survey taken against the age group between 25 and 54, for which advertisers hold preference.

The U.S. public broadcaster PBS pointed on Fox News’ ` Broadcasting tendency of Experts-oriented perspective` as its strongest feature on the 5th. While CNN focuses on fact-delivery of correspondents from 42 branch offices around the world, Fox News helps viewers look at issues from the perspective of experts. In fact, its famous discussion program, `Special Report`, is spared of 5 times more time than CNN’s counterpart program. CNN’s CEO, Walt Isaacson, protested against this and said, “Because CNN is pursuing genuine journalism called fact-delivery, people turn to CNN when real big events occur.” However, when the U.S. president George W. Bush’s State of Union address was televised through the three broadcasters at the same time, Fox News had more viewers than what CNN and MSNBC had together.

The three broadcasters’ competition is also appearing at the competition of star anchors. CNN recently brought in Paula Zahn from Fox News and Aaron Brown from ABC, and also renewed the contract with Larry King. Fox News hired Greta Van Susteren from CNN and Geraldo Rivera from MSNBC.

Sung-Kyu Kim kimsk@donga.com