Fox News Channel, the premiere success of the cable industry, is about to celebrate its 10th year in the business on Oct. 7.
Reminiscing on how he remembers a reporter laughing at the news conference where he introduced the network, Roger Ailes is now the one chortling, as Fox News has grown to double the viewership of its nearest rivals.
"I watched CNN for a week before I went on and I kept trying to wake myself up," Ailes told The Associated Press. "I kept nodding off and I realized they are biased, they are boring, they looked like a network that has never had any competition."
From the business side of the equation, Fox is now going to find out what its made of as their viewership for the first eight months of the year is down 5 percent overall from 2005, with larger decline of 13 percent in prime-time according to Nielsen Media Research. That makes it 12 months in a row that prime-time viewership has declined.
Their eager little competitor CNN in the meantime has grown by 5% through the month of August. Yet even with this slowdown, Fox is still blowing them away with an audience of 845,000 to CNN's 466,000.
The bigger problem for Fox is that they are in the process of negotiating new fees with the satellite and cable providers and the smaller viewership can't help them. Still, because as a new channel, Fox allowed much lower fees to get things going. Now they want some of that good-will back and are asking for much higher fees.
While they will get a larger amount, the lower numbers will probably temper what they could have received if they were still growing fast.
As Ailes said though: I wouldn't change places with anybody else and they would change places with me in a heartbeat. For all the attacks we get, do you think MSNBC or CNN wouldn't want to be where we are?" We all know the answer to that.
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