Only 2,000 or so of us a day will miss Fox News as it disappears from Sky UK. No more hate and Hannity, no more identically coiffed blondes, no more Fox and snarling friends.
One moment they’re all there, the next they’re gone. A purely technical decision, says New York HQ. The audience is so tiny, they lose money on transmitting it. And its style and substance are so American-targeted, that such failure is endemic.
That’s phooey, of course. Fox live in British living-rooms was a reminder of what “fair and balanced” US news could be like, when run by Roger Ailes.
It was an ideological hoot produced along dark corridors where predatory males walked free. It was also an embarrassment for 21st Century Fox bosses hoping to take over all of Sky.
So, a strategic withdrawal: the tarnished family silver stowed in a bottom cupboard. Out of sight, out of Whitehall’s mind.
But there is just one more stretching point here. Throughout his hegemony, Rupert Murdoch has been an apostle of his own conservative values.
He brought them to Britain and exported them to America. He bankrolled Fox News and sought to export them again.
Universal truths. Except that there are no exports now. Fox has no friends in mid-Atlantic.
