Further, Fox’s core audience remains suspicious of Fox’s competitors. In fact, according to a Pew Research Center study, a remarkable 87 percent of conservative Republicans stated that they believe the news media to be biased. Fox is where they turn for the “fair and balanced” truth.
More crucially, Fox only needs to maintain a relatively small number of viewers to remain a dominant player in cable news. Unlike the network era, in which Walter Cronkite could command an audience in the tens of millions, Fox can thrive with an audience of three million nightly viewers. Even more crucially, Fox, because of its built-in popularity, is able to command larger carriage fees than most of its competitors. To carry Fox News, cable and satellite TV companies are required to pay an average of $1.41 per subscriber per month. Multiply that by tens of millions of cable TV subscribers. It’s a ton of money.
These carriage fees play a major role in subsidizing Fox’s bottom line. And they’re negotiated years in advance. Barring an epic collapse of pay television, Fox will continue to collect this revenue for years to come. A new competitor for Fox, such as a hypothetical Trump TV, would likely take years to gain a foothold in the cable marketplace.
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