The fall TV season kickoff hasn’t begun yet, but News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch went out on a limb yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVI Conference in New York and predicted that Fox will win the key 18-49 demo for the season again – and by a larger margin. He sees a stronger start in the fall, another big kick from "American Idol," and, he notes, Fox will have the Super Bowl as well.
"We had too much baseball," Murdoch said of past years, when playoff games delayed the premier of many Fox shows until the middle of the November Sweeps. "We’ll still have the World Series, of course, and one division, which is fine, and clear the deck quite a bit," he said. Murdoch likes the fall schedule for Fox and says the network will be competitive on Thursday nights for the first time since its launch. Thus, he is able to predict that Fox will be #1 again and widen its lead over #2. "Now that’s a pretty bold assertion for this early in the year," he acknowledged, but that’s his call.
