Coming, a swing to the center for Fox News

Rubert Murdoch, now 85, is fighting his last great fight, working to patch up the cable news network that is Fox News Channel in the wake of the harassment scandal set off by Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit.

Murdoch will fail.

Too much damage has been done, more dirt is likely to come out, and the man behind it all, Roger Ailes, with whom Murdoch created the network, is gone, ousted.

Like Humpty Dumpty, the Fox News that was can’t be put back together again.

Murdoch’s two sons, James, 43, and Lachlan, 45, will take over and rebuild Fox News, if need be from the ground up, and they will move the network to the center of American politics, shedding the rightist skew of its reporting and commentary so adored by their father.

They’ll move Fox News to the center not because of their own political beliefs, which reported are more middle of the road.

They’ll do it because they have no other choice.

It’s all in the numbers.

Fox News’s audience is huge, but it’s also old, Baby Boomers now in their late 60s and early 70s. Their numbers are shrinking, and at some point they will tumble as death takes its toll.

In the meantime, there’s a generation coming to power even larger than the Baby Boomers, the Millennials, now crowding into the 18-to-34 age bracket.

While there’s much back and forth over just what Millennials believe in, we do know this. They are less tied to political dogmas, more independent in their thinking, and if they are dissatisfied with how Washington works, they’re much more interested in finding solutions to problems.

That only makes sense. It’s going to be their America. They have a huge stake—the rest of their lives and their children’s lives—in making sure that it works.

Like Baby Boomers before them, Millennials will dramatically change America, remaking it in their image to suit their needs. Marketers, attracted by their sheer numbers, will do everything to cater to their needs, just as they did for Baby Boomers in the ’60s and ’70s.

So will media outlets-especially news outlets.

In the case of Fox News, what’s at stake is not just the cable news audience, where it’s long been No. 1. It’s the entire TV news audience.

All the broadcast networks face the same aging problem, with audiences nearly as old as Fox News’. They’re all going to be chasing Millennials with equal fervor.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, Fox News has as good a chance, if not a better chance, to win this audience, creating an even bigger, more powerful news network.

Two factors were behind the early success of Fox News.

First was the decision to target a specific viewership. In doing so, it broke with a longstanding broadcast tradition going back to the early days of radio of striving to reach the broadest audience possible.

The second was to opt for a news-opinion format over straight news, in another important break with broadcast tradition.

These two decisions gave Fox News a built-in audience—America’s disaffected right—and solid, consistent ratings, without the severe dips CNN experiences during slow news periods.

While in some ways Fox News appeared to be aping right-wing talk radio, it was really anticipating—in some ways writing the script for-the internet and internet news: Opinion mixed with fact and news targeted to specific audiences.

These two qualities—targeting and news opinion—are totally portable.

To change your audience, you change the conversation.

The ability to do this well gives Fox News a huge advantage over CNN and MSNBC but also CBS, NBC and ABC.

CNN and MSNBC to one degree or another have attempted to follow the Fox News model, without success. The broadcast networks have never tried.

Over at Fox News, all the focus these days is on the cleanup process being led by the elder Murdoch, but in the coming months all that will change when sons James and Lachlan step in. The only question is when.

Tags: abc, audience, cable, cnn, FNC, fox news, gretchen carlson, james murdoch, lachlan murdoch, msnbc, murdoch, nbc, rupe, rupert murdoch, viewers