Columbia Journalism Review
Dec 10, 2000
Last Dec. 10 was a big news day. President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. Senate negotiators announced they had agreed to a compromise on health care reform, final preparations were being made for a global conference on climate change and new details emerged on five young American men who had been arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of plotting terror attacks. Not to mention that America was involved in two wars and was still in the throes of the worst recession in eighty years.
That night, the main news programs on the three cable news networks – CNN Tonight on CNN, Fox Report on Fox and The Big Picture on MSNBC – all led with approximately five minutes of coverage of Obama, cutting between video of his prize acceptance speech, reports from on-the-ground reporters in Oslo. CNN and MSNBC also included on-air analysis of the speech by a variety of commentators. Fox had no such commentary on its news show, just a more-or-less straightforward report on the speech.
This might seem surprising, given the charges of bias leveled against Fox by members of the Obama administration. Charges, for example, like this from Anita Dunn, then the administration’s director of communications, speaking last October on Howard Kurtz’s CNN program, Reliable Sources:
The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological… What I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party. . . They’re widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.”
Dunn’s strong talk set off a round of finger-pointing that hasn’t abated since. Her statement was attacked by both political professionals for its form and by Fox adherents for its content. The pols said the form of the complaint too overt and thereby bad political tactics, somehow legitimizing Fox and raising the news channel to equal standing with President Obama. The prevailing wisdom on such disputes hasn’t changed since it was first advised never to argue with someone who buys his ink by the barrel. You can’t win. The basic advice from this quarter was a president should never stoop to conquer.
Apart from the wisdom of the White House tactics, the content of the criticism was said, mainly by Fox, to be mistaken in that it failed to differentiate between Fox’s news programming and its opinion programming.
A close look at Fox’s operations seemed an obvious way to examine the claims and counter-claims. When I approached Fox to gain access to their studios and staff for a story about the nature of their news operations, the first thing I was told was that if I wanted to do a piece on Fox, I should do a profile of Shepard Smith, their main news anchorman. I should be careful, they told me, to distinguish between Smith, a newsman, and their bevy of much more notorious personalities – Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck and Greta Van Susteren. They aren’t really news people, I was told; they are editorialists and ought to be analyzed as such. It is analagous, they suggested, to newspapers, the editorial and op-ed opinion pages of which ought not be confused with their straight news coverage.
The proposal to do a story on Smith was fair enough, but would not in any way address the central issue: Was Fox a political operation? I declined. A Smith profile would be a wonderful story for another time, I told Fox, but it wasn’t the story we felt relevant at the moment. That being the case, Fox “declined to participate” in my reporting, which is another way of saying I should go do something to myself and possibly the horse I rode in on, too.
I’ve been told worse, so I wasn’t offended. It put the story in a bind, however. I had thought a reported story on how Fox assembles its daily programming would be useful. Doing a story on Fox without access and cooperation necessarily changes the nature of the story. So in lieu of talking to Fox, the main thing I did was let Fox talk to me. That is, I watched a lot of Fox News and I must report the Fox spokeswoman was absolutely correct. Shepard Smith is an interesting guy. He is far and away the most charming personality on Fox. Not that this takes special effort. Generally speaking, Fox doesn’t do charm. O’Reilly, for all of his considerable talents, blew a fuse in his charm machine years ago and it’s not clear Beck ever had one to blow. Let’s not even start on Sean Hannity and Cavuto.
Smith’s show – or, rather, shows; he hosts two of them every weekday– are absent much of Fox’s usual cant. They are odd in Smith’s own ironic, idiosyncratic way, but not so unusual that you couldn’t imagine them appearing on one of the other cable news networks. In sum, they seem a perfect rebuttal to Dunn’s critique.
Now Dunn is no political naïf. She’s a seasoned, winning political operator. She didn’t wander accidentally into this thicket. She strode straight to it with nary a sidestep. Neither are Fox’s leaders naïve. In particular, Fox CEO Roger Ailes is himself a seasoned, some might say marinated, winning political operator. Somebody was being disingenuous. Shocking, I know.
There is no shortage of people eager to comment on Fox and the nature of its news. We thought it simpler and potentially more valuable to just watch its programs and see what they said. We decided to examine and compare the prime-time programming of a single day, Dec. 10, a Thursday. The newscasts that day and the programming that surrounded them offer some clear testimony on the question of what Fox News is.
The big event of the day was Obama’s Nobel Prize speech. The coverage of the award to Obama provides a handy schematic for the three networks typical modus operandi. As noted above, all three networks led their nightly newscasts with the speech. The speech actually occurred early in the day, our time, so it was the subject of comment throughout the day and into the prime-time big money shows of all three networks.
CNN had, as it almost always does, by far the most diverse array of commenters, including partisans from each side as well as others regarded as centrists. Their reaction contained by far the broadest range of the three channels, ranging from Jack Cafferty – “ a great speech. . . . mesmerizing” and David Gergen – “transcendent quality” – to Alex Castellanos, a GOP consultant who thought it too self-absorbed – “It was I, I, I all the time” – and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson who termed it a “complex, intellectually rich, impressive speech.”
MSN offered generally effusive praise. Chris Matthews called the speech “a morally powerful speech worthy of a Jack Kennedy, a leader who refuses to give up the hope that war will forever be necessary.” Chuck Todd labeled it “realistic idealism.” Cynthia Tucker thought it was “a very powerful speech. . . a speech for grown- ups . . . that embraced complexities.” Lawrence O’Donnell and Howard Fineman agreed it was humble. Historian Michael Beschloss said it was “elegant as always.” Rachel Maddow summarized it as “an eloquent speech on the nature and responsibilities of war.”
Fox News in its news broadcasts generally praised the speech or quoted others who did so. Major Garrett, the network’s White House correspondent, reporting from the scene of the award in Oslo, termed the speech a “muscular defense of war.” Others invited to comment on it during the news show were generally favorable. Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives, termed it a “very historic speech. And the president, I think, did a very good job of representing the role of America.” Charles Krauthammer demurred somewhat, saying “it was the best speech he has ever given on foreign soil,” implying that other prior speeches were limited in their effectiveness.
It was all downhill after that. On Fox’s array of hosted opinion shows – O’Reilly, Beck, Cavuto, Hannity and Van Susteren, the speech rode the down escalator through the evening. Said Hannity: “President Barack Obama joined the likes of Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore earlier today when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony in Oslo, Norway.” Hannity later said Obama, whom he called the “anointed one,” had appeased the crowd with criticism of the US. “Obama just can’t seem to give a speech overseas without bashing America,” he said. Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard praised the initial portion of the speech but said “the second two- thirds was filled with typical Obama rhetorical flourishes and excesses.” John Bolton, Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrapped up the night’s commentary by telling Van Susteren the speech “was a pretty bad speech. turgid, repetitive. I thought it was analytically weak, sort of at a high school level. It’s like he didn’t have any lead in his pencil left after his speeches at the U.N. and the speech on Afghanistan. So all in all, a pretty surprisingly disappointing performance.”
The same pattern repeated itself through the three networks’ coverage of the other events of the day. The formal newscasts for all three networks were fairly straightforward but the commentary that came before and after was anything but. MSNBC tended to love whatever the Democrats had done that day. CNN has so many commentators it almost can’t help but be on all sides of every issue and Fox, meanwhile, was raising an army to overthrow the government.
Here are some more samples.
On the Senate compromise on health care:
MSNBC – Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a Godsend.” Howard Dean said “the Senate bill really does advance the ball.”
CNN – Rep. Barbara Lee (D –CA) called it “the type of coverage that they (her constituents) deserve.”
Fox – Neil Cavuto posed this question to independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut: “But how do you, Senator, they just didn’t put lipstick on a pig? It’s still a pig, right?” Lieberman was noncommittal on the porcine nature of the compromise, but assured he would vote against it. Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard said “it is absolutely insane.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said “It is the lump of coal in our Christmas stocking.”
On climate change:
MSNBC – Jonathan Alter, addressing Sarah Palin’s claim that climate change is not necessarily the result of human activity: “Her bigger problem, if she wants to be a candidate, is that she`s on the wrong side of history. She`s on the wrong side of science. She`s on the wrong side of politics here.”
CNN – Kitty Pilgrim, CNN Correspondent: “The United States is falling behind the rest of the world in what some see as the cleanest energy option available, nuclear power.”
Fox – John Stossel, host of a new Fox business program: “Horrible, disgusting fear-mongering.” Amy Kellogg, Fox Correspondent: “. . . .stolen e-mails suggest the manipulation of trends, deleting and destroying of data, and attempts to prevent the publication of opposing views on climate change . . .”
The three networks are, of course, all in the same television cablecast business, but each approaches its business quite differently, each seeking its own distinct niche in the modern television ecology. The difference is most apparent in their staffing structures. Of the three, CNN produces and broadcasts much more news content and has many more reporters reporting from many more places. (It has a total staff of about 4,000 people, according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s latest available report (http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_cabletv_newsinvestment.php?media=7&cat=4). On Dec. 10, for example, it was the only one of the three networks to actually feature on the ground reporting from both Pakistan and Virginia on the case of the five Americans arrested in Pakistan.
CNN includes opinion and analysis as an adjunct to its news operations. Fox seems to include the news operations as an adjunct to its opinion and analysis. It isn’t the problem that Fox straight news is relatively bias-free and its opinion programming overwhelmingly conservative. The problem is that the news portion of this is very small and the opinion portion very large. Fox has a reporting and editing staff about one-third the size of CNN, Fox has many fewer bureaus, both domestic and international (again, about one third CNN’s total). From personal experience covering news around the world, you almost always will run into a CNN crew or stringer. You almost never run into a Fox reporter and never one from MSNBC.
MSNBC has about half the staff that Fox employs, roughly one-sixth that of CNN. In some sense, MSNBC has almost no news operation whatsoever. It is almost purely a talk network that puts news shows on, but with content almost entirely drawn from its corporate big brother, NBC. Even at that, NBC’s news operation pales compared to that of CNN.
As striking as are the differences among the channels there is one overwhelming similarity – whatever it is that dominates cable news it is largely not journalism. The ratio of news to everything else is preposterously tilted toward everything else. What is the everything else, exactly? There is a lot going on on-screen all the time – whatever the image that is being broadcast at the time, plus a chryon, or label, identifying the scene and/or the people in it, plus the ever-present scrawl at the bottom of the screen, sometimes commenting on the scene being broadcast, sometimes referring to something utterly different. But for all of the hyperactivity it’s surprisingly old-fashioned. There is much less use of moving pictures than one would think, very little actual images of news events. Mainly, what is going on instead is just talking. Even when there is big news to be broadcast most of the time is spent assessing it rather than reporting it. Studio hosts talk to reporters and sometimes to themselves. The hosts talk to one another. The hosts talk to guests, either gathered in the studio or at another studio or by telephone. The guests are a familiar collection of politicians, some experts, and a group we could call expert commentators. What, for example, is David Gergen’s expertise other than commenting?
Over the course of an average day, all this talking adds up to more than half a million words spilled on cable news air. That’s a phenomenal amount of verbiage –by volume, a new War and Peace every single day. It does not, as you might guess, approach anything like the art and coherence of a novel. Most days, there probably isn’t a single sentence of decent literary quality.
What are they talking about all the time. Usually, they’re talking about what a particular little morsel of news means. What is that bit of news good for? Whom is it good for? Who’s up, who’s sideways, who’s selling the country down the river? There is a very large measure of performance involved in all of this. The studio hosts typically play some amped-up, over-the-top version of themselves.
They bring to mind nothing so much as one of the vibrant monologues from the Howard Beale character in the movie Network: “Television is a Goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom killing business!”
If you talked all day every day you’d say some pretty stupid stuff and, no surprise, the cable talkers are no exceptions. Much of what gets said, in fact, is just barely above gibberish. On his Dec. 10 show, O’Reilly led with an attack on Dick Wolfe, the creator of the Law and Order television franchise for allowing a character on one of his shows to criticize O’Reilly by name. To buttress his rebuttal of Wolfe, O’Reilly quotes – who better? – himself. Later in the show, he interviews fellow host Glenn Beck about President Obama’s Peace Prize, which Beck says was given as a sort of affirmative action award.
BECK: I used to believe in a meritocracy. I used to believe you would…
O’REILLY: Earn things?
BECK: You would earn things. I have no problem with the president winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
O’REILLY: No, I agree he didn’t earn it, but so what? It’s Norway. You know? It’s Norway. You know what I’m talking about?
BECK: Well now that you put it in that context.
O’REILLY: Right. And I love Norway.
BECK: You’re exactly right. Who doesn’t love Norway?
O’REILLY: I love the fjords.
BECK: Sure.
O’REILLY: I’ve been to Oslo.
BECK: I have never.
O’REILLY: Right. I believe I have some Viking blood in me.
BECK: Do you? I think you do.
O’REILLY: OK. So…
BECK: I want him to wear the hat with the horns. Don’t you? Seriously.
O’REILLY: It’s Norway.
BECK: Send him the hat with the horns. He’ll wear it. But (SINGING) la la la la.
(SPEAKING) He’d do it.
O’REILLY: Easy, Mr. Fascination. Calm down.
There’s a loopy self-absorption to this that is peculiar to Fox and that derives from its origin narrative as the network for the unrepresented, for the outsiders. There is a strain of resentment, of put-upon-ness that pervades almost everything Fox puts on the air.
No reasonable person would sincerely deny that Fox has a distinct bias favoring Republicans and conservative Republicans, especially. Even Fox used to admit as much. When he started the network, Roger Ailes was straightforward in talking about his desire to redress what he saw as ideological bias in the mainstream media. Scott Collins, in his book Crazy Like a Fox, quotes Ailes telling a colleague: “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals. And we’ve got to fight that.”
He wanted to address the same “silent majority” his old boss Richard Nixon had sought to serve. This is nowhere more apparent than by the guests who appear on the network. On the day in question, other than short video clips of news conferences or other public appearances, Fox didn’t put a single Democrat on the air except as foils for Republican or Fox commentators to react against.
This appears to be politically motivated, but that could be just an artifact – it seems to be political because the content is, but the aim is much more likely commercial. Cable news is not literally a broadcast business, but a narrow cast. At any given moment, there are a relative handful of people ( in peak hours less than five million and in non-prime hours half that, out of the U.S. population of 320 million) watching any of these networks. This is a small market, but one with a much larger mindshare mainly because the media is self-reflective, creating a kind of virtual echo chamber.
Ailes is an extraordinarily acute businessman who has, according to an excellent recent piece in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/media/10ailes.html?hp=&pagewanted=all), turned a fledging news operation that barely existed a decade ago into the runaway market leader in cable news and a profit engine for Rupert Murdoch’s global News Corporation.
Is it an arm of the GOP? Not unless you think Roger Ailes would actually work for Michael Steele. It is more likely the other way around. Steele, in some broader cultural sense, works for Ailes, who is without close contest the most powerful Republican in the country today. The national Republican Party has shrunk to a narrow base with no real agenda other than to oppose everything the Obama administration proposes. This extends even to opposing policies Republicans either created or once supported. In explaining these reversals, Republicans frequently say that their changes of position – for example, on deficit reduction measures that they routinely dismissed when in the majority – owes mainly to changes in national circumstances. But the main circumstance that seems to have changed is their loss of formal power in Washington. This suits Fox perfectly and gives heft to their self-definition of an insurgency.