Fox Business Network spreads the good word

It also does its best to reassure you that business is good (in all senses of the phrase).

With that in mind, Fox News boss Roger Ailes was baiting the competition months ago. Last February, he told The New York Times he had often seen things on CNBC “where they are not as friendly to corporations and profits as they should be.”

As for Team Fox, he added, “We don’t get up every morning thinking business is bad.”

Probably not. But Ailes has made a policy of acting as if he thinks his business — the news business — is bad enough. Bad, that is, with the notable exception of his staked-out corner of the media universe, where a handful of righteous players (like newborn Fox Business as well as his bruising Fox News Channel) hold forth against what they decry as the liberal media elite.

No less than when Fox News Channel challenged CNN on Oct. 15, 1996, Fox Business reflects a branding strategy straight from the well-thumbed Ailes playbook.

Fox Business spent much of last Friday observing the anniversary of 1987’s “Black Monday” market crash with recaps, analysis and where-were-you-then recollections. The moral of the story, as framed by the network: Things turned out all right, didn’t they?

Thank goodness Fox Business is here now to keep spreading the good word. Most media outlets are all too focused on “biz-blasting,” as Asman termed it during his interview with a guest who duly echoed the Fox Business gospel.

Dan Gainor, director of the Business & Media Institute, came packing research he said proved most media coverage slams the business world. Item: During the market explosion the past few years, the media, instead of “crowing about it,” dwelled on “downbeat news.”

Already a viewer can sense this won’t be a problem on Fox Business. Here the glass of capitalism is apt to be reassuringly half-full, if not overflowing. Free enterprise won’t be blasted by Fox Business, which is busy running interference for it. And encouraging the audience not to get rich, necessarily, but to believe.

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