Fox News' Female Short Skirts Get Ratings Over CNN

For the first time, according to Nielsen, CNN came in third place in cable news program ratings behind Fox and MSNBC. CNN had 1.14 million viewers in March, compared with 1.16 million for MSNBC and 2.3 million for Fox News. Some say the reason is Fox is conservative; it's really their focus on women anchors with short skirts.

So Fox could be liberal as heck and still have the same ratings if they had the same "sex sells" strategy. There have been a lot of Fox female anchors doing the showing of a lot of leg: E.D. Hill, Ainsley Earhardt , Linda Vester, Gretchen Carlson, and Catherine Herridge to name some of them.

That's a lot of women, and I'm sure I've left someone's name off the list without intention. The point is, it's too much of a habit to ignore, thus it's part of the high ratings, because it builds expectations that a viewer will see women in short skirts, especially in the morning.

Is this a bad thing? Well, yes and no. Look, we can't deny that above all else, television is a visual medium. It's not radio at all. So people react to what they see. Moreover, we're wired to reproduce -- people forget that -- so visual cues that appeal to our sexual nature will get more attention than those that don't.

That's a fact.

I can't blame Fox for this. But I can blame Fox for coupling it with some lame reporting. Much of it's so biased I don't watch it at all. I flip between CNN and MSNBC. And CNN has some attractive female anchors, but they don't present them like Fox does. If they did, I hate to write this, but CNN would overtake Fox for the ratings lead.

The question is will they do this?