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Tim Graham

Tim Graham is the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, a conservative organization that says it aims to fight “liberal bias in the media” and “to neutralize its impact on the American political scene.”

Alicia C. Shepard interviewed Graham on September 21, 2007.

We are going on the premise that Fox [News Channel] is a very successful news station. And it’s demonstrably so. I am wondering why do you think that Fox is so successful, especially in the short amount of time?

Well, there are several reasons. Obviously, I think the first thing people would look at is that Fox, first of all, had this unconventional way of getting cable [providers] to sign on. I mean, they basically paid people to run Fox News. So they were pretty successful. They put a lot of investment into putting the signal or putting this program network on cable systems all across America. That’s where it starts.

But obviously, part of it is the programming itself. The programming itself went from this upstart competitor to CNN to thumping CNN badly. So I think part of it, obviously, is Fox has made a decision to try and be different than the other news channels.

How do you feel that they are different?

Well, they have made it a mantra to say that we are the “fair and balanced” channel, which I think the establishment media read that pretty clearly. And I think conservative Americans read that pretty clearly as to the right of the media you are used to. So I think the one place where they haven’t been what you might call particularly fair and balanced is in reference to the cause of or the success of the United States or the idea that Fox News is American and is of America and derives its freedom from America.

I think the rest of the media sometimes may seem less objective when covering causes they really care about, but yet very objective when it comes to America’s cause in the world. So you have executives like David Westin of ABC saying, “I am so objective, I can’t really say whether the Pentagon’s a legitimate target of attack.” So to me that’s a rather extreme formula of objectivity, that we are so outside of America that we can’t even suggest that an attack on the Pentagon isn’t a legitimate attack on America. I mean, I think the obvious follow-up would be, “Well, would it be an attack on American democracy if a plane flew into the ABC News building?” Well, I can’t say. To me, it’s sort of absurd.

But I think one of the things that Fox does is that it flies that flag in the corner sometimes. The correspondents will wear a flag on their lapel. Whereas, again, people like Tom Brokaw would find that offensive and taking sides to wear a flag pin, even though, again, you will see that the network people, for example, will wear pins for other causes. Judy Woodruff will wear a pink ribbon for breast cancer — not that that’s a partisan issue.

But I think the big difference between Fox and the other networks is that it is apart from the others. And since it doesn’t always do everything that everybody else does, everybody presumes that the majority or the mass of media are the fair ones, and the outlier is the tremendously biased one. I think the coverage of Fox News in segments of the old media — whether it’s 60 Minutes, whether it’s PBS’s media unit, the MacNeil/Lehrer media unit — they always pursue this from the perspective of there is the mainstream media, and then there is Fox, which is out of the mainstream.

So do you perceive Fox as the mainstream and the others out of?

I would simply say that Fox is identified by almost everyone as a conservative network. I think that conservatives probably think of Fox sort of as theirs. I think you certainly can see that in some of the viewing patterns. For example, I want to say it was the 2004 Republican [National] Convention where Fox during the night was actually beating all networks, including the commercial ones.

By broadcasting the Democratic or the Republican?

Then when they went to the Democratic Convention their ratings were much lower, which suggests that some Republicans want to see their team, and they don’t want to see the other team. But patterns like that seem to suggest, certainly, that Fox News has a sizable conservative audience. So then people will say, “Oh, let’s determine the content of the news by the audience it gets.” Well, look, by that standard we could say let’s look at the audience of National Public Radio. And without actually listening to what’s on the air, let’s make a supposition about the content based on its audience.

I think that happens, don’t you?

Yes, I do. It does. But I am just saying that if NPR would consider that to be unfair and perhaps prejudicial, it’s certainly also true of Fox. Now certainly, Fox in prime time, at least for two hours of prime time, looks conservative to people. The O’Reilly Factor is a show that’s seen as a conservative show, although I am not sure [Bill] O’Reilly always matches that. I think sometimes he wants to slip the reins of that image. And then you have Hannity & Colmes, which apparently most people consider that [Sean] Hannity wins every night the way they treat it. The way Al Franken writes about it, where [Alan] Colmes is smaller type.

Some people have even said just that Hannity is so much more telegenic than Holmes.

Exactly. I was going exactly there. I think somebody on Slate has said Hannity is better looking; therefore it’s not a fair fight. I think you could probably make the case that Colmes is not always bringing his entire fury to the debate, because I have done stuff with Alan Colmes on the radio. And I know what he sounds like in full fury. But I think there is a mistake sometimes, though, to presume that these hours of talk TV are representative of the network as a whole.

I was going to ask you about that, whether or not the whole network is labeled by O’Reilly and Hannity & Colmes.

Well, it would be like defining CNN by watching just Larry King.

Right. Or just watching Glenn Beck and then saying that CNN [Headline News] . . .

That Headline News is a right-wing channel. I think that’s part of it. I think certainly our own studies have shown a marked difference among Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Our coverage of Iraq showed that, for example, when United States troops killed al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Fox said, “Well, it’s a good day.” And they seemed fairly positive on-air. CNN and MSNBC trotted out experts to say this doesn’t mean anything. So there are differences.

Earlier you were talking that Fox is a little bit more pro-America?

Yes. I think that’s the one area where you could say they haven’t taken fair and balanced to a level where they would say, “Huh, America, just about the same as every other country.” For example, I am sure, and I haven’t seen today, but I would imagine that Fox is more dismissive of the Iranian president wanting to lay a wreath at ground zero. They are probably willing to cast what the left would call a nationalistic look at it.

Whereas when you look at the other networks, we found yesterday that they didn’t even want to mention why someone would deny the Iranian president that visit, that Iran is on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror, that the president of Iran denies the Holocaust and this sort of thing. So I guess what I object to is not so much people wanting to argue, “Is Fox conservative?” I think what I object to is the idea that Fox is the only network you can plausibly accuse of favoring one side.

And what do you mean by that?

That in some cases I would say that Fox is fairer, that Fox is more balanced. Fox will, in fact, put more Democrats on to speak if they will come on than the other networks will put Republicans on.

Do you have an example of that?

I am trying to think. I think that one of the things that is funny is that we did a study — it’s a while back now, about five years old — of global warming. And we found that Fox had two-thirds of its guests believe that global warming is a serious problem, to one-third who thought that global warming is not a serious problem. A right-winger would say: “Wow. That makes Fox look liberal.”

Compare those to the other networks that basically had 98 percent or 99 percent of their guests who suggested global warming was a very serious problem, and only 1 percent or 2 percent of the other side. So the question would be, “Which one is more fair and balanced?”

Now obviously on this issue, you also break down to a bunch of people — and this is where the media-bias fight really starts on a lot of these issues — where people say: “Well, there aren’t two sides. There is fact, and then there are the people who are deniers of fact.” I think when that sort of concept comes — and I would charge it with a certain amount of hubris — when that hubris emerges, that’s when the real media bias begins. Because people said, “Well, there is no plausible other side; therefore, we are not going to allow it.”

That is a good example. Global warming is something that people just make assumptions. And again, I think it might go back to O’Reilly and Hannity & Colmes, that they have assumed that Fox does not think global warming is a serious problem.

Yeah. I think if you try to do story counts, you are going to find — somebody charged me with this morning — Fox has done less on Jena 6 than CNN. That’s true. I am sure that’s true. So the question becomes, does that mean Fox is biased, or does that mean CNN is biased? Or just does it mean that both of them have different emphases? CNN is based in Atlanta, so it has a Southern bias. I don’t know. I haven’t actually seen any Fox coverage of the Jena 6. But I am just supposing that they probably had a different approach. And they may have done that story less.

Let’s take, for example, I think the first thing that the left would probably go to, when we are discussing Fox, would be the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. Fox was pretty much the first cable outlet to actually give this group some airtime to actually air, in free media, the commercials they were considering. Now obviously I think those commercials also aired on Fox paid, but they aired both as paid commercials and on their free television.

Well, did they air ads as news examples?

Yeah. I am pretty sure they aired on newscasts as well, not in entirety, but . . .

But as news, not as a paid advertising.

Exactly. I think Fox was pretty much the first to do that. And within a couple of days, the other cable networks began to pick up on that. But the establishment networks waited weeks to touch that. ABC in particular waited until [John] Kerry denounced it. And then I guess the networks — I may have that wrong — in terms of acknowledging they were commercials and so on, they were very slow to cover it. And they covered it as a “Why won’t [George W.] Bush tell these people to stop.”

Sort of the way now people are saying why don’t [Hillary] Clinton and [Barack] Obama decry the MoveOn.org ad?

Exactly. And I think again, the fight there they would say, obviously, Fox News has an agenda against John Kerry. And I think that the obvious question is, “Well, is it possible the other networks have an agenda in favor of John Kerry?” Look at Mr. Rather and what they were doing at CBS. They investigated for years George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard and mounted no similar investigation into the claims that these people were making that John Kerry’s service wasn’t exactly the heroic narrative he said it was.

So I think that shows an imbalance of scrutiny; let’s put it that way. There are times that Fox will do a story that nobody else will do. Now on the other hand, a lot of times, though, the story that everybody else will do, Fox will also do. It doesn’t try to play the heroic outlier that will omit stories that everyone else thinks are news. It may do less than the Jena 6, but it’s not like somebody is going to sit there and say, “I am going to hold my breath until I turn blue and not cover the Jena 6.” You know what I mean?

Whereas these networks will all sort of band together and say, “None of us is doing Paula Jones.” And, of course, that was before Fox’s time. But I am saying it’s that notion that in some cases or causes that they will hold their nose and say, “We’re not doing that story.” And Fox will. And they will say, “See, Fox is the Republican channel.”

Do you think Fox is the Republican channel?

I think it’s plausible to argue that Fox is the most friendly to the Republicans. But I keep trying to turn this around and say if that is the case, then the question that needs to be asked is, is CBS the Democrat channel? Is ABC the Democrat channel? Is NBC the Democrat channel?

Again, I think the funny thing about the emergence of Fox News is that conservatives have felt for years that the entire national media is sort of an edge onto the Democratic Party. That feeling is added to when you have had sort of the revolving door, with the campaign manager for George McGovern running NPR in Frank Mankiewicz, the chief of staff to [Democratic Senator] Ted Kennedy running CBS in David Burke, and so on and so forth. And now we have Tim Russert and George Stephanopoulos doing Sunday shows, both with backgrounds in Democratic politics. So there is that sort of feeling.

And then you have [Fox News President] Roger Ailes.

Exactly. Ailes, in a sense, though, was never in government. That’s the interesting part. He was in campaigns.

And he was in television.

He was in television with Mike Douglas. But he was in campaigns. He was never in government. And the other funny thing, of course, was that Ailes was at CNBC. Ailes was in the “mainstream media” before he moved to Fox.

And he may have stayed there. They decided to rejigger the network and didn’t have a place for him.

Yeah. I think the question is, if they have always thought it preposterous that somebody would suggest that someone with a background in Democratic politics can’t do mainstream media, that they can’t do a somewhat objective take on the news . . .

Who is “they”?

Well, starting with Stephanopoulos himself, or Jeff Greenfield himself, or Tim Russert himself. And we have never tried to say that because someone had a background in Democratic politics that they can’t be objective. I think there are times where we have praised Jeff Greenfield’s reporting. There are times when we have praised Tim Russert’s questions.

But I am not so sanguine about Stephanopoulos. He seems to me to always be on the cell phone to [James] Carville. And, in fact, Stephanopoulos said on Imus [in the Morning] a few years ago that he talks to James on the cell phone every day. So I keep that in mind when I watch him.

So, again, my overarching point is, if this question is going to be asked of Fox, it needs to be turned around on the rest of the networks. I have also found this to be the case when — and I haven’t done this in a long time now — I used to look at Federal Election Commission records. And you’d find that media company executives were more often donors to the Democrats. That may not be as true now with the Republican majorities. This was pre-Republican majorities. So that’s been a long time ago. It’s like ’92.

Well, do you ever write about Fox?

Sure. Well again, we had the study of the cable-news networks’ coverage of the war. Although I would say that covering cable news is tougher, especially in studies, because you have to ask yourself which hour is representative of these networks. We have already suggested that 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. Eastern is probably not the best time to compare the networks to each other. Just as you wouldn’t want people to define what MSNBC is 24 hours a day by an hour of [Keith] Olbermann.

And you can do that with the commercial networks. You can compare news guests very easily?

Right. So what we tried to do in the cable-news study, for example, of Iraq is, I believe — I am going from memory here — we segmented afternoon hours to more represent their sort of daily pedestrian news output. Now, of course, somebody could say if you watch Fox during the day, some of their ratings success may be due to how heavily they cover the tabloid topics.

Yeah. O.J. [Simpson] is all over Fox right now.

Oh, my goodness, I can’t stand it. In fact, people like Laura Ingraham have been very critical of Fox for spending too much time on Paris Hilton or O.J. So I think everybody understands that you can’t do wonky stuff all of the time.

When you write about Fox are you ever looking at flaws in their coverage? I mean, do you find those and report them as well?

I guess I would say that we are not in the business of denouncing Fox for being too uncritical of conservatives. You know what I mean? On some level, our mission is to document and expose liberal bias. So to some extent, to us it’s not part of our mission. You leave that to the other side. Just like you wouldn’t ask Media Matters, why haven’t you proven a pro-Clinton bias somewhere? I mean, they’d look at you like, “That’s what we want is pro-Clinton bias.” And I think that’s the assumption of media watchdog groups, that this is really a protection racket or a pressure-group approach meant to spin the news your way.

What do you mean “a protection racket”?

Well, that if a media research center complains enough about how Bush and [Dick] Cheney are covered, that the media will bend over backwards to be positive to them. That’s really never been our objective. Certainly it’s not a mission we have accomplished — wouldn’t stand on an aircraft carrier for that.

But I would say it’s certainly true that when you complain and say, “We believe this coverage is not fair and balanced,” we believe that certainly moving the networks toward more fairness and balance would be more favorable to conservatives. So we obviously acknowledge that. But we also would say that the citizenry of the United States deserves to hear both sides. Really what happens is you have a bunch of people who say they are committed to completely informing the electorate, when they actually, a lot of times, shut out half of the information because they don’t want people to know that information.

Well, you remember there was a study done by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed the bias toward John Kerry in 2004, and that there was an equal bias on Fox, but that Kerry was treated much better on the networks.

Yeah. And there is a series of studies that people do. I know that [Tom] Rosenstiel’s people had done a study. And we always get in there.

Have done a study on what?

Well, I am thinking of theirs on [Al] Gore, actually. I think they did a study on Gore where they basically said that on these isolated issues, the media was more pro-Bush than Gore in 2000. And I remember us thinking, you sort of cherry-picked which examples you were going to use, like we picked these three stories to study. But if I can talk inside baseball for a minute, I think in our case we always assume that when our research comes out, a large segment of the media will dismiss our findings as partisan. Therefore, we are going to study a whole month of something. We are not going to pick and choose.

For example, we covered seven months of the morning shows. Here is how many Democrats they had on. And here is how many Republicans they had on. And then we let people say, “Well, there is a reason for that.” OK, maybe there is a reason for that. But this is the way the bookings came down. We covered the whole seven months. Of course you have to stop and start somewhere. But you don’t say, “Well, we only picked the ones where the Democrats were discussing immigration,” or something.

I really felt that some of these other studies would pick up on the issues they wanted to address and ignore everything else. And whether they are doing that out of bias or whether they are doing it because they don’t have a lot of resources. And we have a debate then over media bias. It’s going to be a little hard in a six-minute TV segment to discuss what’s flawed with the other guy’s methodology.

That’s not the way to go after them. But let’s talk about the impact on Fox, if any, of having the Democrats pull out of the Fox-sponsored debates.

Now we haven’t studied cable in terms of the number of guests. Obviously, Fox’s Democrats, I guess the interesting thing is . . .

I am talking about the Nevada debates.

Sure, I understand. I think what you have now is, if you go back before that, John Edwards was on Fox quite a bit. People try to embarrass him with that. He made like 30 appearances on Fox. Maybe that’s high. But there was some number that Edwards was fairly common turning up on Fox, before that whole thing started. And, of course, now he is almost never there. It’s very rare now. You see Hillary [Clinton] doing Fox News Sunday. There is a weird way of saying, “Well, Fox News Sunday in a way is a Fox News Channel show, but it’s really more a Fox broadcast show.” So did she really go on Fox [News Channel] or did she go on Fox broadcast?

Because in Washington that will appear on the Fox channel, not Fox News Channel.

Right. And it does air later on Sundays on Fox News — I think 5 p.m. Eastern. But Hillary has only appeared on Fox. Other than [Chris] Wallace, I think she has only been interviewed by Greta Van Susteren. In 2004, the Kerrys went everywhere, but not on Fox. Hillary, just the other day, when she announced her health plan, went on all of the networks and not on Fox.

This, to me, underscores the critique I am making to you. And that is that Democrats perceive that everything is supportive of them, except Fox. And the kind of funny story of Hillary’s tour was, the best, most promotional treatment she got was with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, the so-called former Republican. But that was probably the best interview, at least the most gushy interview that she got.

I was going to ask you whether you had watched — and you obviously did — the Hillary Clinton coverage of her health-care plan. For instance, I saw on Fox that they said this is going to be government-paid. And they said it would be supported by getting rid of the Bush tax cuts. And the reality was that Clinton did say that anyone who made over $250,000 would no longer benefit from the tax cut. I am sure there were mistakes made in other publications as well, but right now I have been paying attention to that.

Well, I was hoping for all of them — and here is just nerdy journalism guy coming out — that they understand that people making health-care proposals in a primary election are making castles in the air. You don’t have to go any further than Bush running in 2000 with his education plan, which he abandoned as soon as he was inaugurated.

Or Social Security.

Yeah, you had Republicans whose idea of being difficult on the House floor was to try to get the Bush campaign plan on education amended into Ted Kennedy’s education bill, which was what “No Child Left Behind” was. So it’s a wonky question, but I would have liked for somebody to ask Hillary, “Does this really mean anything?” Because it’s not what you are going to propose when you are elected. If you are elected, you are going to have a different plan than this one, I would expect.

And that’s not a question from the left; that’s not a question from the right. What you got, instead, was embarrassing questions where Diane Sawyer asks her, “John Edwards says that if he doesn’t get universal health care, he is going to cut off Congress’ health coverage.” And Hillary has to explain to her, “Um, that would require a vote of Congress.” Come on, Diane. I mean that’s Poly Sci 101. I don’t understand how some producer would let her ask that question. I know I am going off the point.

Well, you are just dealing with how well the media follows up and asks really good questions.

Yeah. Everybody wants that. Again, I would say this is what’s wrong with the mainstream media is that only one network asked Hillary about Norman Hsu, which was NBC. Only one network asked Hillary about MoveOn.org, which was CNN. So you have, what, on ABC and CBS, it was all hunky-dory, happy happy. So it’s that sort of thing. Where is the scrutiny?

As someone who pays close attention to the media, do you think that Fox does do a better job than other networks or cable outlets in presenting both sides of an issue?

Well, as I made in my global-warming example, I think it certainly shows that. For example, when we graded the coverage leading up to the war in 2003, when you presented the idea that the war was going well in the first few weeks — which it was — Fox was getting it right. Now somebody would say now that Fox is being Pollyanna. But again, some people were excessively negative about how the war was going when obviously by April 9 Saddam was overthrown. They were the ones saying this was going to be a quagmire, that Saddam would remain in power for 10 years. They were the ones that probably should have been embarrassed. And then we had the whole occupation or whatever go south by the end of that year.

Let’s go back to the debates. I was asking you about the impact of the Democrats pulling out of Fox-sponsored debates because they thought they weren’t going to get . . .

Well, the first impact is that none of the candidates want to appear there now, at any time during the day. You know what I’m saying?

Want to appear on?

Fox itself. John Kerry made appearances in 2004. Howard Dean made appearances on Fox in 2004.

I have talked to several people on the “left” who say that this is a bad idea, that Edwards and Clinton need to reach the audience that Fox has, [that] if they want to have a wider appeal, they can’t ignore such a powerful network.

Well, I am sure to some extent they would say, plausibly — as the Republicans would say when it comes to, for example, doing a debate on Univision or doing a debate with Tavis Smiley on PBS — it doesn’t help me to be interviewed on Fox. It’s more likely to produce a gaffe, which I don’t need. Therefore, I am skipping it. And if MoveOn is giving me the cover to skip it by saying, “Don’t give them any cred,” well, then, I’ll take that, too. I think if it wasn’t for this environment, Edwards would clearly be on Fox as much as he can probably get on.

Well, was it the haircut issue that turned him from going on Fox?

No. He was the first one in Nevada to say, “I won’t do the debate.”

Right. But I have never seen a good reason other than “They won’t treat me fairly.”

Well, my guess is that Edwards just wanted to be the first one to the left-wing barricade on that. I think his whole campaign this cycle has been trying to be over there, as strong to the left as he can take it, to really appear pure to the left wing.

Well, he brought up last night, I believe, that someone asked him — I guess Judy Woodruff asked him — about Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan. And he said: “Well, it’s great. I mean it’s the same plan that I came out with seven months ago. I am glad to see her joining me.” And the implication being, I have already done this. I am out front on a lot of these issues.

I was going to ask you another question about how influential do you think Fox really is in the political presidential campaign process?

Well, again, I would say that, if I go back to the Swift Boat scenario, I think that’s a scenario where you can say it does have some clout, because it made that issue visible when nobody else would make it visible. Remember, the Swift Boat Veterans started in May. They had an event at the National Press Club in May that everybody skipped.

I guess CBS did sort of dismiss the story. But it’s that whole idea of, well, this isn’t going to be a scandal. We are all going to look at each other and say, nah, Fox sort of forced that on the agenda. I think there are times where Fox’s coverage of something put something on the table. I would imagine if we sat down and watched the coverage of the MoveOn.org ad, that Fox had some impact on making that more prominent.

And this is where, obviously, a Democratic operative would look and say: “Fox is damaging us. Therefore, they are a Republican channel.” And a Republican can turn around and say: “Look what they did with Mark Foley or Larry Craig. And they then turn around and smear that controversy all the way over the Republican Party.” It’s not just an isolated incident. It’s somehow emblematic of the entire conservative establishment.

Oh, you are talking about “they” being . . .

The “mainstream” media. I guess what I am trying to say is, if Brian Ross does an expose on Mark Foley and everybody else gloms on, it doesn’t seem like ABC’s out on a limb because everybody else is picking it up. But if Fox is the only one to do Swift Boats, again, they look like the outliers. The one that’s truly trying to make a story that nobody else thinks should be a story.

Could you not argue the same thing with Dan Rather and the National Guard story?

Well, the interesting thing is, when that story broke, in the first 24 hours, the other networks reported that like it was legitimate. CBS is reporting. Here they go. ABC and NBC were quoting from these phony documents. They didn’t attempt to verify them. They repeated CBS. So I think the other networks by nature, by reflex, are going to surround CBS and say, “Yes, if they have done something, it obviously has credibility”; whereas when Fox does a story, CBS, NBC, and ABC go: “Well, wait a minute. We better look into this for three or four days before we try to figure out some cockamamie Republican PR stunt.” So I think there is one of these things is not like the other.

Then there is this enormous blob of liberal media that [thinks]: “We are the establishment. We are the mainstream. We are the professionals.” And when we are critical of Fox, we have been critical because they have hired somebody who has a record of liberal bias at another network, like Greta Van Susteren did, although again, a lot of her bias came out in the impeachment process. Obviously Greta is not politics all the time. Greta is Jon Benet and O.J., and the same with Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo Rivera during the impeachment process was probably the biggest partisan on television. So those are the intriguing things. Fox actually has a lot of people on air who have been on the other networks. Right? I mean, Fox has made a real effort to bring in a bunch of people who have been on other networks.

Well, Chris Wallace, Brit Hume . . .

And down to the Jon Scotts and the Gregg Jarretts, I mean all the way around. Linda Vester, they had Paula Zahn for a while. Ailes has not been shy about bringing in a whole slew of people who have worked at the other channels. We have Bill Hemmer now. Most of those are not people we would say, “Oh my God.” Geraldo was hard to take. And one of the reasons I am sure that Ailes has done this is to say: “No, this is a real news network. This isn’t some class project. This isn’t a cable-access show. This is real news media.”

I think that’s where I would argue, I think, if you go back to the interviews that Fox did with Kerry in 2004, they were a bit namby-pamby because Fox wanted the access. Sean Hannity — if they think Alan Colmes goes soft, go back and watch Sean Hannity interview Kerry in early ’04 — as I remember it anyway, was a little “How you doing, pal?” I may be overdoing it, but . . .

Talk about the friendship between Roger Ailes and Rudolph Giuliani.

Well, now you are lining me up for the other thing, where I can really critique Fox. And that is, Fox is based in Manhattan. Social conservatives have a problem with Fox, because for example, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade in January, hundreds of tens of thousands of people marched in the March for Life. Fox does not find that newsworthy. You won’t see segments on that on O’Reilly. And you probably won’t see a segment on that on Hannity & Colmes, either. They are not that excited about abortion as an issue.

If you study the network, day in and day out, you would find that Fox is not that excited about gay marriage as an issue. O’Reilly doesn’t mind the gay issues. In fact, he is much more willing to do those than abortion. When I studied it a while back, he was much more likely to do gay segments than abortion segments.

That’s interesting. And what does that speak to?

Well, I guess I am saying that it would fit in, to some extent, if somebody wanted to say that the natural favorite to Fox would be Giuliani. Here is a guy who doesn’t have conservative positions on either one of those issues. But the other point being that when you have a reception for the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, Fox News has been very supportive of that. Fox News sends its own anchors to that. Fox News pays money to that. I am simply saying that certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype of a Jerry Falwell channel. Not a Christian conservative channel.

So what are they, then? More conservative politically and not about social issues, is that what you’re saying?

Yeah. I suppose someone would want to charge it’s more of a “Giuliani Republican” channel. I am simply saying, in that case, sometimes they defy that idea. And I haven’t done formal studies of that. But this is based on my personal watching. I did study three months of O’Reilly back in 2002, just sort of on my own. I studied three months of O’Reilly and sort of counted up the segments. I think it was the summer of ’02. I have to go find that document. It’s somewhere here in my own personal effects. But it was basically that he had done, I want to say, 12 or 13 gay segments in summer ’02 and only two on abortion. So that’s always just sort of been a suspicion of mine, that these are issues that they are not as eager to do.

But they do cover those issues.

They cover them. But I am just saying it would be hard for someone to cast them as . . .

As a Christian . . .

Yeah. It might be easy for people to say, “Well, gee, this is the network of Republican talking points,” which some people will say. I don’t think you can say it’s the network of pro-life talking points. They just don’t show any interest in the issue.

Then would you say [they are] more the liberal Republicans?

Well, I guess what I am saying about abortion is that their record is, if they have a bias, it’s a bias of omission. I wouldn’t necessarily say that when they do the topic they are liberal. I would just simply say it’s a topic they find not to be very newsworthy.

Well, that’s a good observation. Anything else about them that comes to mind?

I basically unloaded. Here are the things I would normally say. And I am sure if I was in a debate with a liberal I would have more to say. But I do think conservatives watching at home feel sort of the same way they would feel with what we do at the Media Research Center. And that is that you have someone saying, “There really is another side to the story.” I think that is part of their appeal is that people are saying, “Well, finally, somebody is going to give this person a chance to talk.”

Let’s just look at our own personal example. And that is the Media Research Center, in the pre-Fox era, had a pretty tough time getting on TV. You know what I am saying? It’s because basically, ABC and CBS and NBC aren’t known for doing segments on liberal media bias. [Media Research Center President] Brent Bozell most of the time would appear on television like on a Crossfire-type show. This is why conservatives used to love Crossfire, because it was one place where they could see conservative people getting on TV and scrapping.

I think someone watching cable today would say you are going to see us from time to time on the Fox News Channel. Now we are not only on the Fox News Channel. But we also tend to make some more appearances on MSNBC and CNN, because we have Fox. I think that may be true in general, that perhaps one of the things Fox News has been able to do in a wider effect is that by giving conservatives and conservative spokesmen more air time than they would have gotten in a Fox-free system, conservatives are better trained for television. They have just had more experience.

And they probably get picked up more, once you are on television.

And producers at other channels then feel they have a known quantity. Instead of saying, “I don’t know about that Bozell — I haven’t seen him do TV.” Now if you are actually watching Fox, you have seen him do TV.

Well, and you do it as well.

Yeah. I was on [Your World with Neil] Cavuto at the very last minute two Fridays ago. Last Friday I was on O’Reilly. And I was on [The Big Story with] John Gibson yesterday. So, of course, I went three or four months without being on before that. I grew a mustache and beard in the summer, and I never got on TV with the mustache and beard because people thought that would look really funny.

So you thought that was it?

Yeah. I said, oh, it ended up being bad luck.

The beard was what gets you off television?

Yeah. I looked too much like the boss.

But there is no doubt that bookers pay attention to who is good on TV and, regardless of the network, they will get picked up by other outlets. So once you are established, which is why sometimes I think there are so few people who go on these shows, they are always using the same people.

Well, this is the neat thing. O’Reilly is great at bringing on people who have never been on TV, probably better than anybody, in terms of I see people on there that I am like, wow, that guy has never been on TV. And I think this is the other kind of interesting thing. Let’s say, for example, the way O’Reilly picked up after the Red Cross after 9/11. Nobody else did that. There are times The O’Reilly Factor really breaks stories and holds somebody accountable. In that particular case, O’Reilly just went on a crusade. And he really made trouble for the Red Cross.

And he was right?

Yeah. So there are times where, again, these people have broken stories. They have broken journalism. They have held public officials or nonprofit groups accountable and broadened a number of stories that people can do.