Transcript: Why FOX News Beat the Mainstream Media
Since its 1996 launch, Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News Channel has provided what its visionary CEO Roger Ailes calls a “haven” for viewers fed up with the liberal bias of the news media—potentially a massive audience, since the mainstream media stand well to the American people’s left.
Watch FOX for just a few hours and you encounter a conservative presence unlike anything on TV. Where CBS and CNN would lead a news item about an impending execution with a candlelight vigil of death-penalty protesters, at FOX “it is de rigueur that we put in the lead why that person is being executed,” senior vice president for news John Moody noted a while back.
FOX viewers will see Republican politicians and conservative pundits sought out for meaningful discussions, skepticism voiced about environmentalist doom saying, religion treated with respect, pro-life views given airtime—and much else they’d never find on other networks.
FOX’s conservatism helps it scoop competitors on stories they get wrong or miss entirely because of liberal bias. In April 2002,the mainstream media rushed to report an Israeli “massacre” of Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin. FOX uniquely—and correctly, it turned out—treated the massacre charge with skepticism. “We try to avoid falling for the conventional liberal wisdom in journalistic circles—in this case the conventional wisdom ‘Israeli bad, Palestinian good,’” says daytime anchorman David Asman. “Too often ideology shapes the tendency to jump to a conclusion—something we try to be aware of in our own case, too.”
Nowhere does FOX differ more radically from the mainstream television and press than in its robustly pro-U.S. coverage of the war on terror. After September 11,the American flag appeared everywhere, from the lapels of the anchormen to the corner of the screen. Ailes himself wrote to President Bush, urging him to strike back hard against al-Qaeda. On-air personalities and reporters freely referred to “our” troops instead of “U.S. forces,” and Islamist “terrorists” and “evildoers” instead of “militants.” Such open displays of patriotism are anathema to today’s liberal journalists, who see “taking sides” as a betrayal of journalistic objectivity.
Asman demurs. For the free media to take sides against an enemy bent on eradicating the free society itself, he argues, isn’t unfair or culturally biased; it is the only possible logical and moral stance. And to call bin Laden a “militant,” as Reuters does, is to betray the truth, not uphold it. “Terrorism is terrorism,” Asman says crisply. “We know what it is, and we know how to define it, just as our viewers know what it is. So we’re not going to play with them: When we see an act of terror, we’re going to call it terror.” On television news, anyway, FOX alone seemed to grasp this essential point. Says Asman: “CNN, MSNBC, the media generally were not declarative enough in calling a spade a spade.”
FOX’s very tone conveys its difference from the networks’ worldview. “FOX News lacks the sense of out-of-touch elitism that makes many Americans, whatever their politics, annoyed with the news media,” maintains media critic Gene Veith. “FOX reporters almost never condescend to viewers,” he observes. “The other networks do so all the time, peering down on the vulgar masses from social height (think Peter Jennings) or deigning to enlighten the public about things that only they understand (think Peter Arnett).”This tone doesn’t mark only FOX’s populist shows,like pugnacious superstar Bill O’Reilly’s. Even when FOX goes upscale, in Brit Hume’s urbane nightly “Special Report,” for example, the civility elevates rather than belittles the viewer. For Ailes, FOX’s anti-elitism is key. “There’s a whole country that elitists will never acknowledge,” he told the New York Times Magazine. “What people resent deeply out there are those in the ‘blue’ states thinking they’re smarter.” The “fair and balanced” approach that the news channel trumpets in its slogan is part of this iconoclastic tone, too. Sure, the anchor is almost always a conservative, but there’s always a liberal on hand, too. By contrast, notes political consultant and FOX contributor Dick Morris, “The other networks offer just one point of view, which they claim is objective.” Not only does the FOX approach make clear that there is always more than one point of view, but it also puts the network’s liberal guests in the position of having to defend their views—something that almost never happens on other networks.
Viewers clearly like what they see. Ratings, already climbing since the station debuted in 1996,really began to rocket upward after 9/11 and blasted into orbit with Operation Iraqi Freedom. “In the Iraqi war,” Dick Morris explains, “the viewing audience truly saw how incredibly biased the other networks were: ‘Turkey did not let us through, the plan was flawed, we attacked with too few troops, our supply lines weren’t secure, the army would run out of rations and ammo, the Iraqis would use poison gas, the oil wells would go up in flames, there would be street-to-street fighting in Baghdad, the museum lost its priceless artifacts to looters, and now we’re onto this new theme that ‘Iraq is a quagmire’ and that there ‘aren’t any weapons of mass destruction’ and that ‘Bush lied’—and all the while, thanks in part to FOX News, Americans are seeing with their own eyes how much this is crazy spin.” The yawning gulf separating reality and the mainstream media during the war and its aftermath, Morris believes, “will kill the other networks in the immediate future—to FOX’s benefit.”
The numbers make clear just how stunning FOX’s rise has been. Starting with access to only 17 million homes (compared with CNN’s 70 million) in 1996,the news channel would reach 65 million homes by 2001 and had already started to turn a profit. A year later, profits hit $70 million and are expected to double in 2003.Though CNN founder Ted Turner once boasted he’d “squish Murdoch like a bug,” FOX News has out-paced its chief cable news rival in the ratings since September 11 and now runs
laps around it. This past June, FOX won whopping 51 percent of the prime-time cable news audience—more than CNN, CNN Headline News, and MSNBC combined. The station’s powerhouse, “The O’Reilly Factor,” averages around 3 million viewers every night, and during Operation Iraqi Freedom the “no spin zone” drew as many as 7 million on a given night. CNN’s Larry King, once the king of cable, has slipped to 1.3 million nightly viewers. Cheery “FOX and Friends” has even edged out CBS’s “Early Show” in the ratings a few times, despite the fact that CBS is free, while FOX is available only on cable and satellite (and not every operator carries it). While the total viewership for ABC, CBS, and NBC news—more than 25 million—still dwarfs FOX’s viewers, the networks are hemorrhaging. CBS News just suffered its lousiest ratings period ever, down 600,000 viewers;1.1 million fewer people watch the three network news programs today than 12 months ago.
FOX enjoys especially high numbers among advertiser-coveted 25- to 54-year old viewers, and it is attracting even younger news junkies. As one CNN producer admits, FOX is “more in touch with the younger age group, not just the 25–54 demo, but probably the 18-year-olds.”Even more attractive to advertisers, FOX viewers stay tuned for 20 to 25 minutes before clicking away; CNN watchers stay only ten minutes. FOX’s typical viewer also makes more money on average—nearly $60,000 a year—than those of its main cable rivals.
Not only conservatives like what they see. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that, of the 22 percent of Americans who now get most of their news from FOX (compared with a combined 32 percent for the networks),only 46 percent call themselves “conservative,” only slightly higher than the 40 percent of CNN fans who do so. FOX is thus exposing many centrists (32 percent of its regular viewers) and liberals (18 percent) to conservative ideas and opinions they would not regularly find elsewhere in the television news—and some of those folks could be liking the conservative worldview as well as the professionalism of the staff and veracity of the programming.
FOX News is driving liberals wild. Former vice president Al Gore likens FOX to an evil right-wing “fifth column,” and he yearns to set up a left-wing competitor—as I if a left-wing media didn’t already exist. Comedian and activist Al Franken’s new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is one long jeremiad against Murdoch’s network. Washington Post media critic Tom Shales calls FOX a “propaganda mill.” Sixties radical and Columbia Journalism School professor Todd Gitlin worries that FOX “emboldens the right wing to feel justified and confident they can promote their policies.” “There’s room for conservative talk radio on television,” allows CNN anchor Aaron Brown, the very embodiment of the elite journalist with, in Roger Ailes’s salty phrase, “a pick up their ass.” “But I don’t think anyone ought to pretend it’s the New York Times or CNN,” Brown sniffs.
Everyday citizens, however, have a very different view. According to a new Rasmussen poll,72 percent of Americans find FOX News reliable. This compares very favorably to the fewer than half of Americans who believe that the New York Times reliably conveys the truth. With its circulation down 5 percent since March 2002,it is the unremitting front-page partisanship of liberal publications like the Times that has severely tarnished their reputations and caused the public to lose trust in their credibility.
Thankfully, news consumers now have other places to go.
