Half-Hour News Hour: Elegy for a bad idea
So, Fox News’ Half-Hour News Hour has been shelved. Why didn’t this work? It turns out that the viewing public just isn’t that easy to fool. If you want people to read your newspaper, you’d better be good at newsgathering. If you want people to watch your news show, you’d better have a compelling news show with a strong personality. If you want to put together a comedy show, you’d better be good at comedy.
It’s not that people don’t watch comedy with a certain point of view — plenty of comedians make no bones about showing up with a message or supporting a particular side of a contested issue. It’s pretty rare, though, that a comedian can get by on preaching alone. It takes a certain kind of fan to appreciate that.
So what killed this show? Read the rest of this entry »