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

The slogan, which Ailes considers a statement of purpose, is repeated constantly on the network alongside another slogan, "We Report; You Decide." It drives countless other journalists up the wall. "They hate the slogan because they think in groupthink," says Kim Hume. Washington Post media critic Shales, a liberal who claims alternately that he never votes but that he did vote for Hubert Humphrey and Bill Clinton, blubbers at "fair and balanced" and seems to hate the entire Fox enterprise. Even conservative Fox fans often have trouble keeping a straight face at the "Fair and Balanced" idea. But the Fox News crew, from left to right, insists the slogan is their credo.

"`Fair and Balanced' is a philosophy," says Kim Hume. "We work it at all levels: assignment level, script level, every level."

Van Susteren asks, "How do you measure `Fair and Balanced'? Minute by minute? Hour to hour? We try to look at both sides of every debate. That's fair and balanced." The razor-sharp law reporter and commentator recalls trying to line up a Democratic senator to appear alongside a Republican colleague on her nightly show. None accepted her invitation, each claiming that 10 p.m. was too late. "I called [Senate Majority Leader Tom] Daschle's office and said, `I don't want to hear any complaints about fair and balanced."

According to Kim Hume, "In our newsroom I see much more back and forth than I ever did at ABC. It was my impression that everybody at ABC thought Ronald Reagan was a dope. There was an ABC producer who said that whenever she had the chance she used an ugly picture of Reagan because she hated him so much."

The Columbia Journalism Review noted four years ago, "The questions persist: Can a news network with executives and on-screen talent so conspicuously and so heavily right of center fulfill a promise of delivering `fair and balanced' news, information and opinion? Does the oft-repeated slogan `We Report; You Decide' accurately describe how the network delivers news?" It answered: "A close monitoring of the channel over several weeks indicates that the news segments tend to be straightforward, with little hint of political subtext except for stories the news editors feel the `mainstream' press has either downplayed or ignored." Taken with the commentary and talk programs, though, the review said the answer would be "a qualified no."

Fox nonetheless has fought hard to live up to its slogans. Marty Ryan, executive producer for political coverage and of Fox News Sunday, built his newsmaker program to go head-to-head in an extremely competitive environment against the established Face the Nation and Meet the Press. "It was hard to get the guests for the first three or four years," he says. "Now it's one of the most-quoted shows in the Monday papers."

And today, with Rivera, Van Susteren and others having joined Fox, the "qualified no" of 1998 would have to be at least a qualified yes among fair critics. When Fox picked up the pro-Clinton stars from CNN, at least some conservative Fox fans were disgusted. Van Susteren laughs that she wasn't popular on her arrival last January. "When I first got here I got a lot of hate e-mail. People hated me at first because they hated CNN. Now I get emails --I just got one from a woman today--who said they used to hate me but that now they're glad I'm here." Van Susteren's ratings--her show has buried CNN's Aaron Brown every month except one when she started at Fox--prove her point.