Is Fox News Becoming the New Kmart?
By: Joseph Serwach
Tags: Marketing, Branding, Politics, Television, Journalism

Is Fox News Becoming the New Kmart?

What’s your brand’s position? When you don’t “own’’ a clear marketing niche, you slowly die

Fox News in happier times: Courtney Friel in New York during the release of the iPhone. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

Fox News — like Kmart — invented a new brand category and position it dominated for years. Kmart and Fox eventually allowed new rivals to encircle them, leaving both brands trapped in a squishy “no man’s land.’’

Kmart, now close to death, was a superstar money-making-machine in the early 1960s as it essentially invented the “discount store’’ position. Kmart was the child of Detroit-based S.S. Kresge, which dominated the “five and dime’’ category starting in1899.

In 1962, as the post-World War II migration into new suburban communities matured, Kmart was launched as something new and fresh, a discount chain designed for suburbia’s boom. Its “Blue Light Specials’’ were a hit.

What killed Kmart? Wal-Mart and Target

Allowing Wal-Mart to take over the “low prices’’ niche while Target took over the higher end “quality,” aka cheap chic end of the business.

When you’re neither the cheapest nor the best, what’s left? Kmart. The weakened Kmart becomes everyone’s second or third choice. With no clear strength or unique mission, Kmart eventually had to die.

How Fox News is another Kmart story

Like Kmart, Fox News essentially “invented’’ a category in 1996: a more conservative cable news channel positioned to the right of what Fox and the world now call “the mainstream media.”

From the start, Fox News was a bit of a hybrid network:

Its prime time line-up has always been dominated by commentary, replicating the AM conservative talk radio format pioneered by Rush Limbaugh starting in the 1980s.

Fox News’ daytime lineup pushed a more “fair and balanced’’ approach to news, hiring a host of Republicans to comfort Republican viewers who never felt they got a fair shake from “mainstream media.’’ But the lineup always included several traditional TV journalists from mainstream networks such as Chris Wallace (formerly of NBC), Brit Hume (formerly of ABC News), and Brett Baier (formerly of a CBS affiliate).

From 1996 to 2000, Fox News was relatively small, overshadowed by the much larger CNN and MSNBC. But Fox News made its name in the 2000 election, breaking the story about George W. Bush’s drunk driving arrest.

For the past 20 years, Fox News “owned’’ its category with its right-of-center news coverage and primetime conservative talk commentators, making it the Right’s network of choice.

It was Donald Trump’s favorite channel, too, as polls showed about half of its Trump stories were positive, and half were negative. At the same time, all Fox rivals ran overwhelmingly negative coverage of Trump.

The Kmart effect: The 2020 election marked a turning point

Back in 2001, George W. Bush famously set the stage for the Red/Blue divide by telling a joint session of Congress, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.’’ America aligned in its fight against terrorism (for a while) but slowly split into camps: Red and Blue.

Fox News remained the “Establishment” source of news for the Right while rivals CNN and MSNBC became more partisan but very anti-Trump. But then Fox got competition from two new cable networks focused on conservative viewers: Newsmax and OAN.

That left Fox News literally in the middle of the five cable news channels: CNN and MSNBC on the Left, Newsmax and OAN on the right, and Fox News sandwiched into a middle position complaining about lockdowns and sounding like what many called “CNN Lite.”

Through summer 2020, the middle ground strategy seemed to work: Fox News became TV’s most-watched network, even briefly receiving more viewers than the traditional big networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC.

But throughout the election, Trump began complaining about Fox News “turning’’ on him, becoming far more liberal. By Election Night, when Fox’s Democrat-friendly “decision desk’’ was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, conservatives began leaving in droves.

Social media exploded with calls to move to Newsmax. Left-friendly news outlets fed the exodus by reporting that a defeated Trump would start his own conservative, pro-Trump media empire, maybe even buy Newsmax.

Newsmax ratings exploded as much as eight-fold. Fox hosts, long considered “suspect” by the Right, flashed moments of anger at Trump people sounding just like MSNBC hosts as they dismissed Trump people for floating “baseless claims.’’ More Trump people moved. Trump himself played up the rivals.

And Fox News is now officially in a Kmart position where neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden and their teams has many good things to say about it. Biden won’t take their questions. Trump still grants Fox interviews but also blasts them on Twitter and during the interviews.

With CNN and MSNBC (growing for their knowledge of the Democrats) and Newsmax and OAN (growing by offering pro-Trump people “the Trump side,”) where does that leave Fox?

Add to that anti-Fox criticism from the pop culture establishment that skewers the network with films like “Bombshell.’’

No longer trusted by the Right and never trusted by the Left, Fox is now trying to cover two political parties that neither like nor trust them. Lou Aguliar of The American Spectator said he was one of more than 1 million viewers who have left since Election Day, calling Fox’s move leftward “ the most astonishing example of media suicide in my lifetime.’’

“Like the other networks, they were broken by Trump, who understands the TV business better than any of them,’’ he declared in a headlined story read line-by-line by Limbaugh (whose conservative radio show has exploded in ratings throughout 2020). Trump tweeted the article as well.

In our niche-channel world of hundreds of TV channels, we now have pro-Trump channels (Newsmax and OAN), anti-Trump pro-Biden channels (CNN and MSNBC) and all are growing while Fox falls.

Could Fox come back with a return to “fair and balanced’’ centrism? Other rivals, including a new WGN national newscast, focus on a “just the facts’’ fair news approach. Most partisans continue to look for someone “on our side’’ leaving Fox still complaining about Democrats but remaining unclear about Trump and Trumpism.

“Ironically, they also made the same hubristic mistake the other media sources did before FNC went live in 1996 — the belief that people had nowhere else to go,’’ Aguliar wrote. “And when they fall for betraying us, and Kathryn Murdoch has to start wearing less expensive attire to a Long Island soiree, we can make the same boast she did: ‘We did it.’”