In 1996, when Roger Ailes left America's Talking (now MSNBC), media mogul Rupert Murdoch brought him on board to the founding team of Fox News.
This was the time when CNN has been consistently the top news channel for the American viewers and this duo had to come out with a unique strategy to lure the news watchers. So they decided to cut the clutter and go directly to their viewers via cable news. Instead of getting paid to show their channel, which was the general norm then, Fox News went a step ahead and paid the cable news operators money to run fox news. This became a major ingredient in the recipe of their undaunting success.
With 17 million viewers watching it on the day of the launch, Fox news immediately became prominent channel news and solidify its position even more in the run up to 2000 American election post which they saw a 440% surge in viewership.
But this was not the only thing that brought this incredible success to Fox News. A lot of credit goes to them for coming up with different news format with heavy visual presentation and cutting stories short down to bullet points to audience’s ease and pleasure.
It was also the Fox News that started the trend of interrupting the regular show to break an important story and the ticker under the screen which is super common now was also started by the channel.
Although through its inception and development, Fox News has courted innumerable controversies, it remains tight on the top spot of #1 cable rating with increasing viewership and international access.
