News Corp. president: Fox Biz content ahead of schedule

News Corp., the parent of The Wall Street Journal and Fox Business Network, released its earnings earlier this week, and lost in the coverage was a comment made by president Peter Chernin about the performance of the new business news cable network.

Chernin hasn’t said very much up until this point about Fox Business, so his comments to investors and the press were newsworthy, but were overlooked by much of the coverage the following day.

Chernin stated, “I think the performance of the channel is right on track; it’s exactly where we’d expect it to be.  I guess the only thing I’d say, is personally is that, you know to start a 24 hour channel from scratch, I think the programming is probably a little bit stronger than I would have expected six months ago.Â

“I think it’s been a great achievement to be able to put up that quality programming right from the get-go and you’re beginning to see them scoop the competition on various things so I think I would say qualitatively probably better and quantitatively exactly what we’ve expected.”

The transcript can be found here. The comment is on page seven of the transcript. In addition, CEO Rupert Murdoch stated that Fox Business was losing less money than the company had budgeted.