Fox Changes From One Dishonest Slogan To Another

The biggest joke in news was for Fox to call itself Fair & Balanced. They are now dropping this dishonest slogan, with two different reasons given.  From The New Yorker:

As Fox News moves further into the post–Roger Ailes era, the network is shedding one of its most iconic elements. According to network executives, Fox News has abandoned the marketing slogan “Fair & Balanced.” The decision was made last August after Ailes’s ouster by Fox News co-president Jack Abernethy, because the phrase had “been mocked,” one insider said. Another executive explained that the tagline was “too closely associated with Roger.” Fox executives have been instructed by management to market the network by its other tagline: “Most Watched. Most Trusted.”

It is hard to overstate the significance of what shedding “Fair & Balanced” means for Fox News. (It would be like the New York Times giving up “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”) Ailes invented the slogan when he launched the network in 1996, and over the years it became a quasi-religious doctrine among Fox’s anchors and viewers…

In the annals of modern advertising, “Fair & Balanced” will be considered a classic. The slogan was Ailes’s cynical genius at its most successful. While liberals mocked the tagline, it allowed Ailes to give viewers the appearance of both sides being heard, when in fact he made sure producers staged segments so that the conservative viewpoint always won.

A Fox News spokesperson confirmed that the network is dropping the slogan but said the branding change won’t affect programming or editorial decisions.

The new slogan, “Most Watched. Most Trusted,” at least doesn’t claim that Fox is not biased, but it is still rather dishonest. Fox is neither most watched nor most trusted.

Fox has led among cable news viewership in the past, but that is starting to change as more people are looking for news unfavorable to Donald Trump. Plus the viewership for cable news is well below that of the network news shows.

Theoretically a show could be putting out false and biased information and still be most trusted if enough people believed it.  However, while Fox is highly trusted by many conservatives, it is distrusted by liberals, reducing its overall ranking. Here is a ranking of trust levels of news sources, with Fox falling below the BBC, NPR, PBS, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, MSNBC, as well as below multiple print and internet news sources: