cable news

CNN is replacing NBC News as the host of the Republican National Committee’s Super Tuesday debate in February. “The Republican National Committee has decided to move forward without NBC’s participation in our February debate in Houston, Texas. The RNC has awarded the debate to CNN, who will broadcast it on Thursday, Feb. 25, in Houston at a location to be decided,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said yesterday.

Last week’s article in New York magazine saying that Fox News Channel leader Roger Ailes “has become less visible” to its anchors and producers on a day-to-day basis, drew this response from News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch: “Oh, it’s bullshit. Absolutely. I’ve got every confidence in Roger, you know? His health is fine. It’s true he had a little problem with his back for awhile, but otherwise, he’s micromanaging the place just as much as ever.”

Jordan Weissmann says that Al Jazeera America’s name and Quatari pedigree may have had a role in its demise, but its bigger problem was its content. “The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, ‘unbiased’ hard news coverage,” he writes. “It made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy.”

According to four high-placed Fox sources, Murdoch is upping his presence at Fox while Roger Ailes has become less visible to anchors and producers, signaling a shift that marks a new chapter in the network’s history. The most visible change is that, since June, Murdoch has been attending Ailes’s daily executive meeting held on the second floor of Fox headquarters.

The cable news outlet, which began broadcasting in August 2013, said it would expand its digital presence in the United States.

Fox Business Network will present live coverage surrounding the Republican presidential primary debates from the North Charleston Coliseum and Performing Arts Center in North Charleston, South Carolina on Thursday, Jan. […]

The New England cable news channel is adding meteorologist Pete Bouchard and journalists Joy Lim Nakrin and Melody Mendez.

Brent Budowsky: “Today we witness one of the greatest scandals in the history of professional journalism. Many of America’s leading television news companies are so fully in the tank for Donald Trump that they should file with the Federal Elections Commission and report their coverage of the 2016 election as political donations to his presidential campaign.”

The brightest star at Fox News, Megyn Kelly is a newly minted role model for women who sees her gender as irrelevant, and a conservative champion who transcends politics with her skillful skewering of windbags of both parties, most notably Donald Trump.

In 2015, primary debates fueled massive ratings increases for Fox News and CNN, while MSNBC began to rebuild.

When 2015 began, it seemed unfathomable by the end of the year that Brian Williams would no longer anchor “NBC Nightly News” or that Donald Trump would be leading in the polls for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. But both circumstances factored into the mixed ratings performance for TV news on cable and the major broadcast networks. Here’s how they performed in the ratings over the last year.