Murdoch's Fox News (Page 2)

If you can make it through O'Reilly, stick around for Hannity & Colmes, Fox's higher-decibel version of CNN's Crossfire. Though the idea is to pit left against right, Alan Colmes, the awkward-looking designated lefty of the pair, is no match for his right-wing matchup, Sean Hannity. Hannity smugly rolls right over Colmes and his Democratic guests while coaxing conservatives to pontificate without interruption. During Fox's postelection coverage Hannity bellowed repeatedly that "the Vice President because of his blind ambition has brought us to the brink of a constitutional crisis" and charged that the Democrats were trying to "steal the election" by demanding a vote recount. Meanwhile, "they might as well have a scarecrow in the liberal seat," says media critic and University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney.

Even Fox's supposedly "straight" nightly news anchors take regular swipes at Democrats. Covering the postelection litigation in Florida, for example, anchor John Gibson railed that "the Democratic lawyers have flooded Florida" because "they are afraid of George W. Bush becoming President and instituting tort reform and their gravy train will be over." Fox further blurs distinctions between news and opinion by having anchors and political commentators switch roles from one day to the next. O'Reilly, for instance, played anchor just after the Supreme Court handed down the decision that ended Gore's fight for the presidency.

Fox's murkiest judgment call may have been hiring John Ellis, the President's first cousin, to analyze election exit-poll results. Lo and behold, Fox was the first network to declare erroneously that Bush had won the election, prompting the avalanche that followed. We now also know that Ellis was discussing confidential exit-poll information with his cousins throughout election night. At Congress's mid-February hearings on election night coverage, Ailes said in his prepared testimony that Ellis was merely acting as "a good journalist talking to his very high-level sources."

But the bias didn't stop there. Peter Hart of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting notes that after Bush was named the winner of the election, "on Fox, the question was posed as, 'Will Bush compromise or will he stand tough on his principles?'" On December 17, for example, Snow asked Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card: "Now, the President-elect says that he wants to reach across the partisan divide, and a lot of people are interpreting that as meaning that he has got to water down his views to appease liberal Republicans and Democrats. Is that what he's going to do?"

This blending of news with right-wing partiality dismays many Fox employees. Although staffers say they don't receive direct orders to include or ignore stories for political purposes, "I've been at editorial meetings," says one Fox News Channel employee who did not want to be named. "Certain stories fly and certain stories don't. I'm not blind and neither are my colleagues. Everyone is aware that something is at work. There's a reason that there's a perception that Fox leans to the right."

A manager at the Fox News Channel who's been in broadcast news for six years and who also declines to be identified says the tilt is reflected in the enterprise pieces aired. "The ideas come from the bureau chiefs, and they want to get their reporters on the air, so they're going to pitch stories that management will approve." Says Sarah Barrows, a former production assistant and booker at the Fox News Channel, "They know who their audience is, and they pick stories based on that." Barrows, now an associate producer at Oxygen Media, says that during the Clinton impeachment investigation, for example, "that story probably led nine out of ten times." The Whitewater investigation was another popular front-runner. "Fair and balanced? Give me a break," says a former Fox producer. "During the Clinton impeachment--which they were just loving--it was OK to run a Newt Gingrich soundbite by itself. But if you ran a soundbite by a Democrat you also had to run a soundbite by a Republican." Though this producer had worked at CBS News and at an ABC affiliate, "I had never experienced a newsroom that was that conservative." Fox management's far heavier hand than at other networks is in part a reflection of the fact that Murdoch owns 30 percent of the stock of News Corporation; the other major television networks are all owned by large corporations with widely held shares.

The Fox spin has even crept into its website; each week it posts a new "PC Patrol," in which columnist Scott Norvell bashes liberal organizations like the ACLU for trying to separate church from state or ridicules feminist organizations for criticizing the comments of Fox favorite Rush Limbaugh.

So there's no question that under Fox's guise of neutrality lurks the right-wing designs of its management. But is that a problem? Contributors don't think so. "Fox reports the news from a more conservative mindset than conventional journalism," says Kondracke, a Fox regular. "And that's good. Because if you only have the perspective of the standard liberal outlook, that distorts reality too. Fox is an antidote to conventional news media." NPR's Juan Williams says that at Fox, "I've never felt so intellectually free." Sure, it's slanted, he says, but "the widespread perception of the American people is 'all these people have bias.'" Fox management, meanwhile, denies any partiality. "We feel that other networks have a liberal bias to them," says Bill Shine, executive producer for the Fox News Channel. "But Mr. Ailes pounds this into us at every staff meeting, every time we get together: 'fair and balanced.'" Ailes declined to comment.

True, studies have shown that Washington journalists are more likely to vote Democratic and identify themselves as liberal. One frequently cited survey by the Freedom Forum/Roper Center in 1996 found that 61 percent of the 139 Washington-based journalists queried professed to being either "liberal" or "liberal to moderate," while only 9 percent said they were "conservative" or "moderate to conservative." But how that plays out in news coverage is a different matter. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in the last weeks of the presidential campaign, Bush was twice as likely to receive positive coverage as Gore. And the group's study examining five scattered weeks between February and June revealed that more than three-quarters of the campaign coverage included discussion that Gore lies and exaggerates or is tainted by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he is a "different kind of Republican." No Democratic bias there.

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