Why Fox Business Needs a Villain

I spent some quality time over the weekend pondering Fox Business, with help from Joe Nocera, and I think I've pinpointed the flaw in the plan.

But first, Nocera. He's "baffled" by Roger Ailes's confidence that he can beat CNBC by putting a different spin on business news -- a more pro-business, pro-America, glass-half-full gloss on the news. Nocera predicts Fox will sooner or later abandon its effort to present the whole world through a financial lens in favor of a narrowed-down focus on one thing:

[F]or the vast majority of people who are interested in business news, their initial point of entry is the stock market.... [Fox Biz anchor Neil] Cavuto likes to say that the stock market is not always the most important business story on most days. He's right -- except if you're running a business channel. For someone in his job, the stock market is always the most important story.

Which, I'm guessing, Mr. Ailes will eventually figure out, and which is also why it would be foolish to discount the Fox Business Network based on its first week.

But what happens then? As I see it, that's where the real challenge begins, at least if Ailes really thinks Fox Business can overtake CNBC in a walk the way Fox News did CNN.

Here's why. For all the talk of how upbeat and optimistic Fox News is, that's not what allowed it to beat CNN. Watch a few minutes of The O'Reilly Factor or Hannity & Colmes and it becomes clear that Fox's brand is much more defined by what it's against: activist judges who parole child molesters; elementary-school principals who ban Christmas decorations; presidential candidates who "refuse" to wear flag pins on their lapels. Fox News's bread and butter is the culture war, and it's forever inventing new campaigns to boil viewers' blood in the dead space between celebrity scandals.

But how do you translate that to business? Where's the us-versus-them? The obvious answer would be to embrace O'Reilly-style ostentatious populism: the forgotten little guy against the sinister corporate interests. But that is, if anything, the opposite of what Ailes has in mind. As he tells Nocera,

We don't view capitalism, corporations or profits as the enemy. If the guys at Enron did bad, they paid for it. But there are 9,000 other companies whose executives go to church or synagogue, and make contributions, and want America to be a great country. And it is not treason to not treat them like bad guys.

Alternatively, Fox Business could adopt a libertarian stance: embattled entrepreneurs versus heavy-handed, tax-and-regulate government. This message will probably sit better with CEOs and stockbrokers, but it's hard to imagine it attracting the legions of small-time investors Ailes imagines are out there, just waiting for a business channel that doesn't talk down to them.