Quote:
Originally Posted by virtua_fish
Just stumbled on this and got a good lol.
In October 2003 the creator of The Simpsons, Matt Groening, revealed that Fox News had threatened to sue Fox Entertainment - which makes the show - over the satirical use of rolling ticker lines on the screen. "Pointless news crawls up 37 per cent... Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com... Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer... Dow down 5,000 points... Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple...," read the ticker on the program that sparked the threat. "Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it.... But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," Groening told National Public Radio. Fox denied that it threatened legal action. [25]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...s_to_criticism
Of course Groening called the bluff. Simple math problem imo. We covered this in another thread when Family Guy made fun of Trig Palin and Momma Grizzly or whatever she's called made public pleas to 'Fox Hollywood' to be nicer.
But ldo Murdoch isn't going to mess with his billion dollar cash cows, so The Simpsons/FG/etc. basically have carte blanche. According to this, FNC had
834 million dollars in revenue in 2008.
Contrast to
The Simpsons:
Quote:
Consumers worldwide spent more than $750 million on Simpsons-related licensed merchandise last year, about half of that coming from the U.S., Fox says.
In addition, advertisers spent $314.8 million last year on the prime-time show on Fox and reruns that local stations air, according to research firm TNS Media Intelligence.
The Simpsons is almost surely worth more to NewsCorp than FNC, probably not close. At least in the near term value, but The Simpsons should stay pretty evergreen for a couple of generations.