"Try a little editorial balance, that might bring in a few more readers to the [Washington] Post," Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto advised Jeff Bezos in a segment on Cavuto's 4 p.m. Eastern Fox News Channel program Your World. "Last time I checked, that has not hurt Fox News, or the Wall Street Journal, or even USA Today" which are media enterprises which are "all known for hearing all sides or trying to" and as a result are "all making money and all growing," unlike competing newspapers which are solidly liberal.
NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell agreed. Appearing on the August 6 program to discuss Amazon.com's founder buying the money-losing broadsheet for a mere $250 million, Bozell argued [watch the segment below the page break]:
If you're alienating over 50 percent of the audience, and remember, conservatives outnumber liberals by 2-to-1 in this country, so if you're annoying so much of that constituency that it leaves you and it goes elsewhere, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that might be why you're losing money. And it's not just newspapers, Neil, look at CNN.
CNN has been going down the commode for years. It walked away, it had some semblance of an attempt at balance back in the '80s and '90s, but it threw it all away, and look what's happened, it's cause and effect here.
"If you see the media all going one way, would it kill you just for the hell of it to go the other way and see what happens," Cavuto then asked, saying "the business guy inside of me" doesn't want to follow the rest of the media "off the edge."
"Sure," the Media Research Center founder replied, adding that "it's a certain level of insanity" that has gripped the liberal media to stay steadfastly wedded to skewing the news in a liberal direction. Sadly, "ideology trumps business sense" in the world of the liberal media, Bozell observed.
What's more, "[n]o one is suggesting" that papers like the Post "surrender their liberalism," but rather that they "balance it" by "bringing in conservative voices [to the newsroom]," the MRC president concluded.
