Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, April 15, 2010

FOX News News

Commentary By Ron Beasley



FOX News was in the news today.  First we learned the Glenn Beck's brand of crazy isn't the draw it was a few months ago.



Beck

Bottom line: Over the last nine months, Beck gained and then lost nearly one million viewers. Trust me, in the world of cable news, that's not small feat.



Based on the numbers I've been surveying, it looks like Beck hit his (non-vacation) 2010 low last week, on April 9, when Nielsen tagged his audience at 1.96 million. By way of comparison, during late January, Beck was averaging more than 3 million viewers each night. And since September of last year, Beck had been averaging approximately 2.5 million-plus viewers each night. But recently, in the wake of the health care reform passage, those numbers have been heading south. Fast.





And then tonight we see that FOX is not as into the Teabaggers and Sean Hannity's brand of snake oil as they once were.



Fox News yanks Sean Hannity from Cincinnati Tea Party rally he was set to star in

Angry Fox News executives ordered host Sean Hannity to abandon plans to broadcast his nightly show as part of a Tea Party rally in Cincinnati on Thursday after top executives learned that he was set to headline the event, proceeds from which would benefit the local Tea Party organization.

Rally organizers had listed Hannity, who is on a book tour, as the headliner of the four-hour Tax Day event at the University of Cincinnati. The rally, expected to draw as many as 13,000 people, was set feature speakers such as �Liberal Facism� author Jonah Goldberg and local Tea Party leaders. Participants were being charged a minimum of $5, with seats near Hannity�s set going for $20, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, which reported that any profits would go to future Tea Party events. Media Matters for America noted that Hannity�s personal website directed supporters to a link to buy tickets for the Cincinnati rally.

But senior Fox News executives said they were not aware Hannity was being billed as the centerpiece of the event or that Tea Party organizers were charging for admission to Hannity�s show as part of the rally. They first learned of it Thursday morning from John Finley, Hannity's executive producer, who was in Cincinnati to produce Hannity's show.

Furious, top officials recalled Hannity back to New York to do his show in his regular studio. The network plans to do an extensive post-mortem about the incident with Finley and Hannity's staff.

�Fox News never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party organizers to use Sean Hannity�s television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event," said Bill Shine, the network�s executive vice president of programming. "When senior executives in New York were made aware of this, we changed our plans for tonight�s show.�

This all comes after Rupert Murdoch suggested that perhaps FOX shouldn't be supporting the Tea Party movement.  I doubt that FOX and Murdoch are suddenly interested in journalism but they are concerned that they may have created  a Frankenstein they can't control. 

Update:

Digby has a different take.



Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)