How Fox Business shifts its content at night

Justin Peters of Slate takes a look at the content that appears on Fox Business Network.

Peters writes, “Late mornings and middays are spent tracking the ups and downs of the financial markets and covering pertinent news stories of both economic and political import. My problem with Fox Business’s daytime programming is the same problem I have with most financial television: No one with any real insight into the workings and futures of the financial markets would ever bother to share their secrets on television. The network is less a destination for investment advice than for financial chatter, and of that chatter the best that can be said is that it works well as white noise.

“The daytime political conversation on Fox Business is civil enough, with the rightward slant manifesting itself in the topics the show chooses to cover and the guests brought on to discuss them. There’s been a lot of immigration and birthright-citizenship talk this week, as you’d expect. But there’s also some more interesting stuff on occasion. Fox Business features fewer know-nothing Congressmembers and leathery military men as guests than does its counterpart, which gives its guest interviews a slightly different flavor. I enjoyed a panel on Tuesday’s Making Money With Charles Payne in which Reason’s Matt Welch and two other guys substantively debated the notion of regulating speech on the internet. (Welch was, convincingly, against it.) Daytime Fox Business is by far the least objectionable part of Fox News and Fox Business’ combined broadcast schedule.

“Things heat up at night, when Fox Business abandons any pretense to being the high-information alternative to Fox News. The network’s evening shows offer a similar mix of caustic commentary and uninformed opinion to Fox News’ primetime lineup. ‘High information, poor judgment’ is the gist of it, though if you didn’t know what channel you were on, you could easily confuse a Fox Business evening opinion show for a Fox News one. The best of them is Kennedy, hosted by the former MTV VJ, but watching Kennedy is still less entertaining than, say, not watching television at all.”