Four-and-a-half years ago, I took a look at Fox News‘ decision to launch a business channel:

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has decided that it’s time to enter a vastly reduced market to challenge an entrenched competitor. Now Murdoch didn’t get to be a multi-billionaire by taking my advice, but this move certainly isn’t one they teach in college. And beyond simple business theory, there are challenges of ideology and demographics to consider.

To avoid cannibalizing current Fox News viewers, Murdoch’s business channel will have to offer CNBC viewers a reason to switch. Fox News is a strong brand that is crushing its competition in the 24-hour news game. But when your brand is most notable for misinforming viewers, the success might not be transferable to financial reporting. Ratings won’t hold up when viewers start to lose money based on reheated administration talking points about our stupendously smashing economy. People say that there are no atheists in foxholes, and you won’t find ideology in trading pits.

Fox News took on CNN and MSNBC because they didn’t like what they perceived as liberal bias and figured they could make money offering a right wing viewpoint.

The problem for Murdoch and company is that CNBC is hardly liberal. In fact, watching Squawk Box with Mark Haines, Joe Kernen and David Faber already seems like watching Fox News, and when prime time rolls around, Larry Kudlow and Dennis Miller get away with even more administration cheerleading than anyone on Team Murdoch.
[...]
So Murdoch’s choices boil down to playing it straight to win serious business viewers and the high ad rates they attract, or try to convert some of the Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel crowd from Fox News groupies into business channel viewers. The choice couldn’t be more stark: financial pros won’t stand for trumpeting whichever employment report flatters the administration while sweeping the others under the carpet, and the Fox News groupies don’t want to hear about the latest darling of the French or German economy.

So I was a bit perplexed when I saw this story in the Guardian earlier this month about the slide in CNBC‘s ratings:

According to figures supplied to the Observer by Nielsen, the television tracking agency, the average number of Americans watching CNBC at any point on the 24-hour clock was 188,000 last month, a drop of 11% on last year. A more detailed breakdown leaked on the internet reveals a 28% plunge in CNBC viewers during the core business day, between 5am and 7pm.

Executives at the network say the numbers are a return to “normality” after a record spike at the height of last year’s financial drama. Ratings in Europe and Asia are holding up more impressively, hits on the network’s website are up 150% year-on-year and page views via mobile phones are rocketing.

But in the core US television sphere, a fall-back to 2007 levels means CNBC has kept none of the new fans who tuned in during the crunch. The channel is slinking back to a dark corner of the cable spectrum.

Could Fox Business Channel be nipping at CNBC‘s heels? Nope:

Fox Business averaged 21,000 viewers between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. in June, according to Nielsen Co.
[...]
Fox Business is in 49 million homes, including the New York and Washington markets.

Percentage of viewers who receive Fox Business who watch it on any given day: .042
Likelihood that cable programming based on Idiocracy‘s all-farting channel would deliver significantly higher ratings: 100%

If I’m not going to get the Pulitzer I so richly deserve for making this call (and many others) so far in advance, at least Murdoch could put me on retainer to help him avoid expensive fiascoes like this in the future.