The fate of the much talked about Fox business news channel, expected to debut in the second half of this year, is in question as the company tries to find out whether viewers would want a third cable business news channel, the chief of Fox News said Thursday.
Comments from Fox News CEO Roger Ailes appeared to soften definitive public comments by executives of parent company News Corp. who in January said they were aggressively pushing for a launch in the second half of this year.
“I keep telling Rupert, ’Quit saying that,”’ Ailes — referring to News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch — told attendees at a breakfast hosted by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School in New York.
Ailes said Fox still needed to learn who the viewers would be, where they lived and why they would watch a third cable business channel. “The question is, does an audience for business news really exist, have they gone on the Internet? ... Are you playing to the viewers in Indiana who are investing, are you playing to Wall Street?”
Ailes stopped short of saying Fox was not committed to launching a channel, whose programming is expected to appeal to retail investors. “We’ll decide whether or not that’s viable,” he said. “We are committed until we’re not committed.”
Fox News, top-rated by viewership among cable news networks and currently programming the top five of the 32 major business news shows, would aim to loosen CNBC’s grip on the top spot among business news channels.
But viewership at the General Electric-controlled cable news network has slumped from late-1990s levels following the dotcom bubble burst. CNBC has said in the past that a chunk of its core viewership — in business offices, at the gym, and in bars — is not tracked by Nielsen Media Research.
CNN, a unit of Time Warner Inc. , bowed out of the business news network market after it shuttered its CNNfn network late last year. Bloomberg LP, the financial news and data company, also operates a cable business news network.
Peter Chernin, Chief Operating Officer of News Corp., in January told investors the company was aiming to launch a business news channel in the second half of this year that would be available to 20 million viewers or more on its first day.
Some 14 million of them could come from distribution over News Corp.-controlled DirecTV Group Inc., the top U.S. satellite television provider.
But when asked whether Fox would launch the new channel just on DirecTV, Ailes told Reuters: “No. It wouldn’t work.”
Media analysts have said Fox News, a part of Fox Entertainment Group Inc. , could pressure cable operators to carry new channels as part of its upcoming negotiations to renew deals to carry Fox News that begin to expire next year.
News Corp also plans to launch a reality-TV channel over the next few weeks. Fox News is expected to exact steep price increases over its current contract, analysts have said.
“You don’t pull the trigger until you know you can win,” Ailes said.
