Fox News has spent 30 years building a wall of viewership that nothing else can touch, and Hugh Hewitt believes that wall was built because the people running the old networks refused to serve half the country.
The story opens with a history lesson. Some mark the birth of modern TV news at June 1, 1980, when CNN started its round-the-clock broadcasts. But Hewitt argues that CNN didn’t change what news looked like — it just made the same kind of news available whenever you wanted it. CNN quickly became a part of legacy news, he says. That is what it aspired to. That is what it became.
Others point to August 4, 1987, when the FCC voted 4-0 to repeal the “Fairness Doctrine” under Chairman Dennis R. Patrick. Still others point to August 1, 1988, when Rush Limbaugh launched his show on ABC Radio Networks with 50 affiliates. Hewitt puts it plainly: “Rush built the mall. Mike Gallagher, Larry Elder, Mark Levin…we just have stores inside that mall.”
Limbaugh proved something to AM station owners. He showed there was a huge audience for conservative talk that the big networks were ignoring. The market responded. Brian Kilmeade, Guy Benson and others on Fox Radio joined the growing universe of center-right programming.
Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch saw the problem clearly. “The good bulk of the press in this country was monolithic — liberal to varying degrees,” he said on the tenth anniversary of the launch in 2006. He had said almost the same thing at the actual launch ten years earlier: “Frankly, all the others look alike. We will be an alternative.”
Murdoch proved the same point cable news could work for conservatives that Limbaugh proved for radio. Fox News doesn’t merely dominate the ratings — it crushes them. Through three decades, the formula stayed the same: put professionals on the air who reflect what patriotic Americans believe, and ask them to present the news in a fair, measured way through the start of prime time.
The hosts are told to “stay within the 20s” even as daytime stays firmly “within the 40s.” The result, Hewitt argues, is a news landscape that would be duller without Fox. “It would be — even its worst critics should admit this — so much less interesting, so much more grey than had legacy news been left to its own devices, pumping out the same-old same-old over the past 30 years.”
The Numbers Behind the Brand
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 1, 1980 | CNN begins 24/7 broadcasting |
| August 4, 1987 | FCC repeals Fairness Doctrine |
| August 1, 1988 | Limbaugh launches on ABC Radio Networks |
| 2006 | Murdoch speaks on tenth anniversary |
Fox’s dominance is visible in the numbers. The network has held the top spot for years, and Hewitt sees no end to that run soon. It is unlikely that Fox News will be displaced from the top of cable news specifically, and indeed increasingly “the news” generally for years to come.
What Legacy Media Is Trying Now
The old networks are finally trying to shake off the bias label they built for themselves since the Vietnam War. Hewitt analyzes their efforts through a university analogy: hiring a right-leaning visiting professor for a year or two as “camouflage not a genuine commitment to the ideas it has long locked out of its halls.”
He calls the mountain to climb “huge.”
The Craft of Journalism
Hewitt argues that journalism remains a craft, not a profession, and that the best practitioners know the whole world around them. He writes that 30 years down the road, the country will check in and see that “journalism” remains a craft, not a profession, and the best craftsmen are fully aware of the world around them, not blinkered to half or more of the news horizon.
That point comes early in his section, not at the close.
The story is a love letter to a network that Hewitt sees as a corrective to everything that came before it. His argument about the demand stands at the heart of the piece. Whether Fox News is truly the solution — or simply reflects what people already believed — is a question Hewitt leaves open.
Source material: “HUGH HEWITT: Legacy media left half of America out. Fox News let them in,” Fox News.
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