Fox News bets the farm

| 1:30 pm EST February 18, 2021
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Just how badly have ratings crashed at Fox News? It’s rapidly gone from first place to third place behind MSNBC and CNN. Fox is losing viewers at a stunning rate. The question was whether Fox would try becoming more legitimate in the hope of competing with CNN and MSNBC, or if it would try becoming more deranged, in the hope of taking viewers back from garbage channels like OAN and Newsmax.

Now we’re firmly getting our answer. Fox News is trying the high risk, high reward strategy of taking its most embarrassing but highly rated personalities, like Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, and making them far more prominent. In fact Carlson now seemingly pops up on Fox all day long, in bizarre segments here and there. This comes even as Carlson is taking his usual deranged conspiracy theories to a whole new level of, frankly, science fiction.

In other words, in the hope of quickly stopping the bleeding in the ratings department, Fox News is giving up on its longtime blueprint of pretending to be respectable while pushing phony narratives. Fox is betting the farm on the notion that it can outdo OAN and Newsmax in the lunacy department. But in so doing, Fox could push away the least unreasonable of its viewers, who have at least wanted to pretend they were watching real news while soaking in the convenient lies. If this risky strategy doesn’t work, Fox may never recover.