(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Jewish Viewers Find a Refuge in Fox News [1]
['Jeremy W. Peters', 'More About Jeremy W. Peters']
Date: 2023-11-03
As CNN and MSNBC went live on Tuesday with breaking news that Israel had bombed the Jabaliya neighborhood, the site of the largest refugee center in Gaza, an entirely different scene was playing on Fox News: a segment from southern Israel reporting that two Israeli soldiers had been killed in battle and two others wounded.
There are no specific metrics available on the religious affiliation of Fox’s audience since Oct. 7, the day Hamas first attacked Israel. But ratings data from major metropolitan areas with large Jewish populations, including New York, Miami and Los Angeles, show a spike in viewership that outpaces its rivals.
Since September, Fox News’s audience has grown by a larger percentage than CNN and MSNBC in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami. And in the New York market — the nation’s largest — Fox has lately beaten its left-leaning rival, MSNBC, by a few percentage points. In September, Fox was drawing 16 percent fewer viewers than MSNBC in New York.
Fox News — with the largest audience in all of cable television in recent years — draws a sizable number of Democratic and liberal-leaning viewers. Among viewers who are 25 to 54, the demographic most important to advertisers, Fox News had more people who identify as Democrats watching in prime time than either CNN or MSNBC, according to Nielsen data through August.
Critics of Israel have noticed Fox’s coverage, with some calling the network “Zionist propagandists” while mocking its coverage as turning a blind eye to Palestinian casualties. (One Fox story that recently came under attack featured a puppy who needed a home after his Israeli owners were killed in the Hamas assault.)
Some Jews who paid little attention to the conservative network in the past are now tuning in — and surprising themselves. In an interview with The Free Press, an outlet that has been critical of mainstream coverage of Israel, one liberal Jewish woman from Minneapolis said, “My friends and I are like, ‘My God, we find ourselves watching clips on Fox News.’”
One liberal Fox host, Jessica Tarlov, said in a recent appearance on “Real Time With Bill Maher” that her pro-Israel perspective put her out of step with younger Democrats but not with many of her fellow older millennials, some of whom recently started watching Fox News.
“My Jewish liberal friends will text me and they’ll say, ‘Oh, this is where you go in the afternoon?’ because they never watched Fox before,” she said.
Fox anchors, especially those who offer the most steadfast defense of Israel on their shows, insist that they are shining a light on reports of antisemitism that other media overlook and are displaying support for an American ally that is being wrongly vilified.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/business/media/fox-news-jews-israel.html
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
