How Fox Business has beaten CNBC

Peter Barry Chowka writes for conservative publication The American Thinker about how Fox Business Network has gotten higher ratings than CNBC.

Chowka writes, “So, both competing channels have adopted a mix of business and politics. Produced in the same house as the its sister outlet the Fox News Channel – the dominant cable news source for the past 15 years – the Fox Business Network appears to have the advantage in this area.

“The production values of FBN are similar to FNC’s, giving each one a similar compelling appearance and an advantage to FBN. This is television, after all, and the ‘look’ is important to the art and science of capturing and keeping viewers. Fox News’s visual presentation has been state of the art and influential, copied by both CNN and MSNBC, since shortly after it went live. A lot of the innovative visual design was attributed to Rich O’Brien, FNC Sr. V.P. and Creative Director for 21 years, the ‘creative genius’ who died in a car accident in July 2017.

“Content is clearly also important. While CNBC (unlike its sister channel MSNBC or NBC News in general) lacks a consistent ideological or editorial spin, FBN is more uniformly business-, capitalist-, and conservative-friendly, and is much more balanced in its political reporting. Its sister channel FNC’s motto has long been ‘fair and balanced,’ and the two channels share that ethic as well as on-air talent, including veteran reporters and hosts Neil Cavuto, Stewart Varney, Maria Bartiromo, and a number of others.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.