| | Report: Fox hires conservative talker to fill evening timeslot
Struggling to hold on to viewers in an early-evening time slot, Fox News has decided to give a controversial right-wing radio host a trial run hosting a new show.
The New York Times reports that conservative talker Laura Ingraham will join a rotating series of personalities on a new 5 p.m. program. Network executives "appear to be grooming her as a new talent for the network," according to the report.
Ingraham, who frequently fills in for the brash Bill O'Reilly on Fox, has made a name for herself with a popular talk radio show that is among the top-rated in the country. Fox will need the rating help, as its previous 5 p.m. report -- America's Election HQ -- placed third last week in the advertiser-coveted 25- to 54-year-old demographic, the Times reports.
It's not just at 5 p.m. where Fox is struggling, either. The network's most recognizable loud-mouth slipped from his No. 1 spot last week among the viewers advertisers want most.
MSNBC is gloating that their star Keith Olbermann bested O'Reilly among 25- to 54-year-olds last week. It's the first time Olbermann has beaten his primary competitor among the key demographic. According to an MSNBC release:
MSNBC NOTCHES DEMO WIN OVER FNC IN PRIMETIME
"Countdown" Out-Rates the "Factor" for First Time Ever
NEW YORK - June 10, 2008 - MSNBC continued its ratings surge last week, with viewers flocking out of the "No Spin Zone" and to "The Place for Politics." For the first time ever, MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" was the #1 show at 8 p.m., out-drawing Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor" head-to-head among Adults 25-54. This is the first time since June 2001 that MSNBC has out-rated "The O'Reilly Factor" at 8 p.m.
Excluding Tuesday's primary coverage, "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" averaged 477,000 A25-54 vs. 472,000 for the "Factor."
Like many who make their livings going on the radio to pontificate about politics, Ingraham has had her fair share of foot-in-mouth fiascoes. Liberal press watchdogs Media Matters for America has called out Ingraham more than two dozen times.
Author Rory O'Connor called her Right-Wing Radio's High Priestess of Hate in a recent column, which documented some of her more egregious errors in punditry.
In one of her most famous incidents, on Election Day 2006 Ingraham encouraged listeners to jam the phone line of a toll-free Democratic Party service for reporting voting problems. No tangible consequences came of it (the Democrats won anyway), but it did put Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy up in arms.
Perhaps the greatest controversy of Ingraham's career, however, came from comments she made about the Iraq War. In March of 2006, Ingraham went on a six-day tour of Iraq, visiting hospitals, orphanages and Iraqi villages. Upon returning to the United States, she appeared on NBC's "Today Show" to criticize the mainstream American media for its unwillingness to report "the truth" of the Iraq situation. She said that NBC had focused on programming "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" and that "to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off."
Washington Post writer Jonathan Finer later reported that Ingraham "rarely, if ever, spent a moment outside the protection of U.S. forces or a night outside a military base." Finer compared her experience with that of the Iraq-stationed journalists she criticized, "almost all of whom operate without military protection." While the National Review's Tim Graham applauded Ingraham for bringing out the "facts the media self-defense teams ignore," MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said on his show Countdown that Ingraham had dishonored the memory of the 80 American journalists killed and others kidnapped in Iraq, and that her comment "was not only unforgivable of her, it was desperate and it was stupid."
The pending Fox gig won't be Ingraham's first experience with her own show. MSNBC hired Inghram in the late 90s for a short-lived low-rated show, O'Connor notes.
Fox apparently believes she's learned how to hold on to TV ratings since then.
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