Ad Insult to Injury

The trial of Fox News for its relentless defamation of Dominion Voting Systems was supposed to be starting this morning, but the opening got postponed for 24 hours, which I guess means the parties are looking at the possibility of a settlement (some radio reporter thought that damages could be lowered from $1.6 billion to $1 billion even, but that the real sticking point for Fox would be Dominion's demand for a public admission of wrongdoing and apology by each of the offending shows). Meanwhile...

Fox News full page ad in NYT this AM on public trust as it seeks to settle ten-figure defamation suit on eve of jury trial pic.twitter.com/MyhbgbSbrg

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 17, 2023

Those are some pretty peculiar numbers, as several people were quick to point out, and pretty mysterious as well. You'll note the indication at the bottom says the poll is from 2023, but YouGov hasn't published a version of that poll in 2023, and the last time they did it, in April 2022, they had radically different results, with ABC and CBS both at 38%, CNN at 36%, and Fox News at 30% (MSNBC was at 28%, if you want to know).

In fact, it looks like the thing pictured in the ad isn't the YouGov poll of a representative sample of American adults as we know it at all; as the indication at the bottom clarifies, it's from a different division of the company, YouGov Profiles, which offers business clients analyses of their customer base:

and the poll illustrated in the Times ad is from one of those jobs, probably carried out for Fox itself as a client: it's of people who watch Fox News (and/or other network news products)...

and colored in particular by the fact that Fox viewers are more exclusive in their habits—more likely to trust only Fox—than the other audiences, a point reinforced by the 2022 poll, which showed how polarized the audiences are toward the bottom of the widely untrusted media, Fox and Breitbart being the most frequently untrusted of all:

Which helps explain why they placed that ad in today's Times: like many big ads in the Paper of Record, it's not really addressed to ordinary readers, but to ad buyers; it's Fox telling its own advertisers, "I know things look bad for us right now, but stick with us—our audience, credulous middle class white consumers with plenty of buying power, still thinks they can trust us, and they always will." 

A message the YouGov Profiles survey may actually undercut, because why does it give them only 41%? They must have started looking, not only at The Weather Channel, but OAN and maybe CNN as well!