The non-blogging Roger Ailes

In what seemed like a slow news day, there was a little sign of just desserts in the latest financial results for Murdoch World aka News Corp., employer of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the goons. It seems that Fox News supremo Roger Ailes went a bridge too far with his vision of a Fox-owned station network that would specialise in English language telenovelas, the sort of daytime soap in nightime that has worked well in Latin America. How could the following not be a recipe for success? (Wall Street Journal, subs. req'd) --

Soon after taking the job [head of broadcast TV stations], Mr. Ailes was confronted with the challenge of finding a new affiliation for 10 of News Corp.'s major-market stations that had carried the UPN Network. Those stations were overnight left without any prime-time programming when UPN and the WB merged to form the CW network last January.

So Mr. Ailes, and Jack Abernethy, chief executive of Fox television stations, turned to the 13-week English-language telenovelas -- programming they were already developing in hopes of selling it on the syndication market. They would be cheap to produce, with episodes costing between $200,000 and $500,000 apiece instead of the $2 million to $3 million hour-long network television episodes can cost.

The network also relied on sex-drenched plot lines and name-brand stars, including Morgan Fairchild, Bo Derek and Tatum O'Neal. "It kind of seemed like 'Dynasty Lite,' " said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

The net result is that the network is losing $2 million a week, nobody is watching, and it's a big distraction for Ailes as he plans on announcing his rival business channel to CNBC next week. Anyway, selling shows based on them starring "Morgan Fairchild, Bo Derek and Tatum O'Neal" sounds like their market research was based on the bitter aging wingers who form the core Fox News audience, who, with a bit of luck, might pull that channel further into irrelevancy as well.