The Fox horizontal integration is brilliant. They pull in people with sports and other complimentary content and cross-sell the profitable propaganda.
The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.
Fox calls itself "Fox News". Only when they're pressed and presented with evidence that they're liars will they hide behind "That's okay, this is all just entertainment!" excuses. Their viewers don't think they're watching made up stories for entertainment. They're convinced that Fox/OAN are the only news agencies that tell the truth.
I’m not a fan of CNN, but they do a better job at distinguishing the difference between news and editorial.
The Fox issue is they conflate the two. I used to watch alot of TV news and the actual news content was pretty good on Fox on national issues, but their affiliates were usually pretty awful.
The news product produced by the networks until circa 1999 were a superior product in every way. Cable outlets have always danced with these issues as a TV channel that says the same thing all day gets boring.
CNN isn't good, but it's not even close to being equivalent. I doubt there's a single news org that doesn't let their bias slip from time to time, but let's not pretend that makes them all the same or that there aren't some much much worse than others.
The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.