Fox outraces the old dogs: in only six years the Fox News Channel has established itself as the premier cable-TV news operation with objective reporting on stories that the mainstream media are afraid to tackle and without the liberal orthodoxy that pervades American broadcast and print journalism today

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 29, 2002 | by J. Michael Waller

They wear American-flag pins on their lapels. They call terrorists "terrorists." They say their news reporting is "fair and balanced." They offer a bigger variety of viewpoints than any other TV-news organization. And a lot of journalists hate them.

They're the reporters, editors and commentators at the Fox News Channel, and they're on a roll. The upstart cable news network just celebrated its sixth birthday, smashing even the most optimistic projections and grabbing more and more of the market. The American people are voting with their remote controls and tuning in to Fox, while CNN and MSNBC nosedive month after consecutive month in the vital ratings race.

Liberal Washington Post media critic Tom Shales dismisses Fox News as a "propaganda mill," but the public thinks otherwise. The latest Nielsen ratings show the edgy, tell-it-like-it-is channel to be the most-watched cable news network of 2002, and the only one to increase its viewership during the year. Flagship anchorman Brit Hume hosts the only cable news program with ratings among entertainment giants ESPN, TBS Superstation, HBO and TNT. His nightly Special Report show has more than double the viewers of CNN in his time slot, with a coveted 25- to 54-yearold viewer demographic exceeding the numbers of CNN and MSNBC combined. Hume's household ratings for the first eight months of 2002 rank Fox News in cable-TV's top eight, while CNN and MSNBC wound up below the Food Channel and Home & Garden TV.

That's pretty sad for the CNN/AOL Time Warner megamedia monster, which had revolutionized the TV-news industry two decades ago. MSNBC, a spiffy and appealing amalgam of Microsoft and GE's subsidiary NBC network that couldn't quite deliver on its promise to meld cable TV with the Internet, puts up a good fight, but it looks like its golden days are gone.

Much of the credit for Fox's come-from-behind success, media observers say, goes to 62-year-old Roger Ailes, who built the Fox News Channel from scratch as a unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. A spokesman for Ailes, a veteran public-relations man long active in Republican politics who has produced TV shows and plays ranging from off-Broadway to Shakespeare, says he does not give interviews. But Bill Shine, network executive producer in New York, spoke with INSIGHT in Ailes' place.

"There have been a lot of reasons for our success, but Roger's decision to remain fair and balanced is the main reason we're here. No other network was like that," Shine says, noting an orthodoxy of worldview among TV news in which nonliberals--the majority of the American public--routinely get the short shrift. "We did this whole change to get both sides to make it fair, to make it balanced. Little by little the American people saw it, liked it, stuck to it and told their friends, and exponentially it grew."

It certainly did. But for the risk-taking Murdoch, Fox News was "a huge gamble," the Columbia Journalism Review commented in 1998 when the channel had been on the air just 17 months. The well-established CNN, the journal said, "is a pillar on the international news scene and a cash cow for its owner, Time Warner, the world's biggest media conglomerate. MSNBC is the privileged offspring of behemoth parents, GE and Microsoft." How could Murdoch expect to compete? "The answer emerged from Murdoch's conviction that most TV journalists are far more liberal than the population as a whole." The market, then, was those fed up with liberal TV news.

Ailes hired Brit Hume from ABC, plucked Neil Cavuto from CNBC and recruited Tony Snow, Fred Barnes, Judith Regan, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, and superstar Bill O'Reilly, whose edgy blockbuster show The O'Reilly Factor is a huge moneymaker. More recently--and to the horror of many conservative fans who feared a sellout--Ailes plucked Clinton defenders Geraldo Rivera and Greta Van Susteren from CNN.

Behind the scenes and in public, while the bureaucratized CNN suffers morale problems and MSNBC just can't seem to regain its niche, Fox News is having a blast. "I enjoy working for such a visionary company," Ailes said two years ago when signing a contract to run the news organization until 2004. "It's fun" Fox News Washington bureau chief Kim Hume--spouse of managing editor Brit--tells INSIGHT. "It's lots more fun than the dreary CNN," says Van Susteren, adding: "There's much more spirit here, more energy."

What makes Fox so much fun? "The management makes a huge difference," Van Susteren says, having jumped to Fox earlier this year. When Ted Turner, the brilliant but quirky founder of CNN, ran the network, CNN felt alive. Now, Van Susteren says, it's too corporate. "It's hard to do your job well with a big elephant stepping on your chest."

Everyone credits Ailes. At the Washington bureau in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, however, hats also go off to experienced and savvy Brit Hume. "We have a leader here who's a managing editor, a journalist," says Van Susteren. "We didn't have that at CNN, which was run by committee." Even though she and Hume come from different ends of the political spectrum, they work as a team. "At CNN, I left a lot of good colleagues, but there would be a group discussion for every decision. You need a strong leader with experience and respect, and you have great morale." She likens Ailes in a positive way to Turner in the early days of CNN.