FBN honcho Roger Ailes, not ready to make nice.Photo: Getty Images
Did anybody else notice the funny timing of the New York Times’ attack coverage of Fox Business Network? On January 4, Jacques Steinberg and Brian Stelter wrote a story called “Few Viewers for Infancy of Fox Business,” in which the two television writers tore down the new channel for getting only about 6,000 viewers during the day. “By contrast, Fox Business’s chief competitor, CNBC, attracted about 283,000 viewers each weekday,” the story explained, going on to accuse FBN of having “bravado” during their launch. “Thus far, at least, CNBC would seem to have easily eluded Fox’s crosshairs,” the writers cackle. The numbers were based on secret Nielsen ratings for the new channel that only CNBC and FBN had paid to receive. On the same day, there were several other stories on the topic, with less gleeful Schadenfreude. And since, in those stories, a Fox rep spoke with reporters, it’s probably a safe bet that they didn’t cooperate on the Times story. In other words, they probably didn’t leak the unpublished Nielsen ratings: CNBC most likely did. Now, it’s pretty easy to understand wanting Rupert Murdoch and Fox to fail. But the aggression in this story was put into a surprising new context yesterday when it was announced that CNBC and the New York Times are starting a content-sharing partnership that has been in the works for a while. From the Reuters story reporting the collaboration:
The deal also gives the Times and CNBC access to each other’s breaking business news as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp prepares to fight them both with the nascent Fox Business Network cable channel and the recently acquired Wall Street Journal.
Um, huh. Is it us, or does it seem like CNBC and the Times had already started fighting side by side?
