An average of 13.9 million viewers watched the opening day of the House impeachment hearings on Wednesday on the ten television networks that broadcast the Democrats' show trial live, according to Nielsen Media Research.  The big news is that the Fox News channel, generally perceived as the network most friendly to President Trump, not only beat its cable news competition, but also came in first in total viewers even among all of the alphabet broadcast TV networks that pre-empted their regular daytime programming. At one time, that kind of ratings victory for a cable channel would have been unthinkable.  It's a measure of the ongoing decline into irrelevance of the country's seventy-plus-year-old broadcast TV networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — which a variety of studies confirm are less trusted than ever by the American people, especially conservatives. Meanwhile, representatives of Fox News itself, now in its 24th year, are...(Read Full Post)