The Millionaire’s Media Megaphone — Part Two
How “Fair and Balanced” is Fox News really?
BY Alicia C. Shepard | September 03, 2008
When Illinois Senator Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination on June 3, becoming the first African-American ever to do so, he and his wife, Michelle, took to the stage in St. Paul, Minnesota. They hugged, and kissed, and then she raised her right hand in a fist and knocked knuckles with her husband in a celebratory gesture familiar to millions of Americans, especially sports fans.
Three days later, that gesture made news on the Fox News Channel program America’s Pulse. Host E.D. Hill promoted an upcoming segment based on the Obamas’ display of affection witnessed around the world: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?” she said to her viewers. “The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We’ll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says.”
But the ensuing segment never actually discussed how the televised fist bump could be interpreted as a terrorist jab or even who — other than Hill — might have suggested that it had sinister overtones. The following Tuesday, after much public outcry, Hill began America’s Pulse with an apology.
“I mentioned various ways the Obamas’ fist pump in St. Paul had been characterized in the media,” she said. “I apologize because unfortunately some thought I personally had characterized it inappropriately. I regret that. It was not my intention. And I certainly didn’t mean to associate the word ‘terrorist’ in any way with Senator Obama and his wife.”
Fox News Channel’s motto is “fair and balanced,” but it has the power to play a politically charged role in the presidential election campaign that is now swinging into high gear. Because Fox News Channel is a one-of-a-kind media phenomenon, the Buying of the President project’s 2008 edition has taken an in-depth look at its role as this political season unfolds.
The 12-year-old channel was too new to have much impact on the 1996 election cycle but had a significant role in the 2000 and 2004 elections — and the current campaign has been feeling its impact since it started. While conservatives frequently complain about The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the major networks, no news outlet draws more scrutiny than Fox.
Perhaps that’s because it’s a new kid on the block and because its founder is the high-profile media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who 1) has long espoused conservative views, 2) is willing to eat millions in losses annually on The New York Post and The Weekly Standard, which both espouse his brand of politics, and 3) hired the long-time Republican communications guru Roger Ailes as the CEO of Fox. Polls show that Fox’s viewers are heavily Republican and conservative.
To many critics, the most telling sign of Fox’s slant is its high-profile, right-leaning pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, even though its news reporting is typically viewed as straightforward. “We are scrupulously balanced during the day,” said Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle, who joined the network in 1996 after working for ABC and CNN. “If you look at political coverage, there is always a Democrat and a Republican together. Or if you’re within one party, you’ll have one campaign’s adviser followed by another campaign’s adviser. There is a scrupulous effort to balance things all through the day.” The pundits come on in primetime.
Ailes rejects the conservative label, even though it’s firmly affixed. “I think conservatives were underserved; that does not make us a conservative channel,” he told the Financial Times in 2006. “I think a lot of conservatives watch our channel; that does not make us a conservative channel. If we are conservative, what does that make the other channels? Liberal. . . . We decided to balance all the arguments and treat the conservative view with the same respect as we have for the liberal view, and that is really irritating some people.”
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Liberals tend to be highly sensitive to what’s said on Fox, charging that Murdoch uses it as an organ of the Republican Party. Despite Fox executives’ denials, support for that perspective keeps turning up, most recently from President Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan.
Appearing this summer on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, McClellan acknowledged that the White House regularly sent “talking points” to commentators at Fox News to ensure that its message gets out. “We at the White House were . . . getting them talking points and making sure they knew where we were coming from,” said McClellan. Later the same day MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann said that McClellan had confirmed to him in a telephone interview that this “was done frequently, especially on high-profile issues.” McClellan did stress that the talking points were given to pundits and not to the Fox journalists reporting the news.
The suspicion of bias explains why E.D. Hunt’s gaffe linking Barack Obama to terrorism, and then doing it again in her apology, made news on other channels and networks and set the liberals in the blogosphere howling with charges that Fox intentionally linked the Democrat with terrorism. It was one of a long string of such incidents, and the first of two in just the first two weeks after Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Only days later, on another Fox News program, anchor Megyn Kelly asked conservative blogger Michelle Malkin if going after Michelle Obama is fair game this political season. Malkin defended the right to criticize the senator’s wife. Under Malkin’s image as she spoke, a graphic touted the segment to viewers who might just be tuning in: “Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama.”
“Baby mama” is a slang term used in the African-American community for a woman who has a baby outside of a marriage. “Where do you even start when criticizing Fox’s slur?” asked Joan Walsh in Salon.com, which first spotted the graphic. “Do you try to explain that ‘baby mama’ is slang for the unmarried mother of a man’s child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend? It’s difficult to imagine a graphic under Senator John McCain’s wife, Cindy, calling her ‘McCain’s Baby Mama.’” This time the apology came from Bill Shine, Fox’s senior vice president for programming.
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On average, 1.5 million viewers are watching FNC in primetime, more than CNN and MSNBC combined, but a tiny number compared with the 35 million viewers watching the largest four networks — more than 28 million tuned in to watch a typical episode of American Idol this year. ABC’s popular primetime comedy Two and a Half Men garnered 13.6 million viewers. But the size of Fox News’s influence greatly exceeds the size of its audience. Why?
“The reason cable news gets so much coverage is that all the journalists have the stations on all the time so we are consistently watching what’s going on,” said Eric Deggans, media critic for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. “The other reason is the audience that watches cable news is a very influential audience. And frankly, the echo chamber of cable can easily spill out to more traditional news and affect their coverage.
“The thing about Fox is framing,” Deggans added. “Fox News Channel is this tribute to the power of framing issues. If you were to take the news stories about Obama, you would see they are about the same as competing channels. But what’s different is the way the anchors frame stories, and lead people into stories, and anchor banter, and transitions, and the graphics. All of those are weighted against Democrats and toward Republicans. What you have is this relatively neutral reporting of news stories framed by a very right-wing Republican point of view.”
Research shows the cable news audience, on the whole, has a bit more money and education than those who watch network news, according to a 2004 study by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Nielsen Ratings show that 1.2 million of Fox News Channel’s typical 1.5 million viewership is 50 or over, an age group likelier to vote than younger people. “It’s probably true that we appeal to white, working-class voters,” FNC’s managing editor Brit Hume said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year.
While what is said on Fox may reach a small national audience, it often gets repeated on Internet news sites and amplified across the blogosphere, generating controversy that’s picked up by other media including the networks, CNN, MSNBC, and newspapers. In the process, opinions and gaffes that originate on Fox — smears, many critics call them, setting off the controversy — are repeated for much larger audiences, sometimes including The Washington Post or The New York Times. MSNBC discussed E.D. Hill’s “terrorist fist jab” on several of its segments, repeating Hill’s words over and over.
To get an idea of Fox’s impact, it’s instructive to look at a study that got a lot of attention when it came out in 2003. The study, by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, sought to tease out the extent of American misperceptions about why the United States had gone to war with Iraq. The group focused on three common misperceptions, that:
* clear evidence existed that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda.
* weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq.
* world opinion supported the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq.
The group conducted three different polls in June, July, and August 2003 and found that 80 percent of respondents got their news from television and radio. And it turned out that Fox News Channel viewers had a stronger tendency than others to believe each of the three misconceptions.
* Sixty-seven percent of Fox viewers said the United States has found clear evidence of a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda; none has ever been established.
* Thirty-three percent of Fox viewers believed that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction, when, in fact, they had not.
* Thirty-five percent of Fox watchers said they thought the majority of people in the world favored the United States invading Iraq.
In each of the three categories, Fox News watchers scored the highest compared with those who got their news from CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, and print. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions,” the study concluded.
A study in April 2007 by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press indicated that 71 percent of Americans regularly watch local news, 55 percent turn to newspapers, 46 percent watch the broadcast networks, and 43 percent get their news from Fox — and 39 percent from CNN.
A later Pew study, in August 2007, showed that the American public doesn’t think much of the news media, believing it to be full of bias, inaccuracies, and refusing to admit mistakes. “However, those who cite the Fox News Channel as their primary source of news stand out among the TV news audience for their negative evaluations of news organizations’ practices,” said the study. “Similarly, Fox viewers are far more likely to say the press is too critical of America (52 percent vs. 36 percent of CNN viewers and 29 percent of network news viewers). And the Fox News Channel audience gives starkly lower ratings to network news programs and national newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post.”
Political perspectives, said the study, play a large role in viewers’ opinions. Fox News had twice as many Republicans as Democrats in its audience. It’s the opposite for CNN, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one.
“Further analysis of the data shows that being a Republican and a Fox viewer are related to negative opinions of the mainstream media,” according to the 2007 study. “Republicans who count Fox as their main news source are considerably more critical than Republicans who rely on other sources. For example, fully 71 percent of Fox News Republicans hold an unfavorable opinion of major national newspapers.”
The study also found that CNN viewers felt much more favorably toward Fox News than did Fox’s viewers toward CNN.
“As far as it being designed for Republicans, one has only to look at the demographics and voting patterns of its viewers to see that Fox News is either accidentally attracting a single group or is actively targeting them,” said Neal Gabler, who regularly criticized the network during the five years he appeared on the channel’s Saturday evening Fox News Watch. “Recently [former Democratic presidential nominee Senator John] Kerry’s pollster, Mark Mellman, determined that the single most Republican cohort outside of self-identifying Republicans was the Fox News viewers. Only 7 percent of them voted for Kerry.”
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Four years after the launch, Fox News Channel was considered a player on election night 2000. It offered all-night election coverage just as CNN and the three networks did, which meant that each network was paying close attention to state-by-state calls the others were making. This is why in 2000, it was a Fox election night call that would significantly shape the outcome of the down-to-the-wire battle for president between Democrat Albert Gore and Republican George W. Bush.
Much has been written about election night 2000, but what many best remember is how Fox, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS blew it. Election night is showtime for the networks. The story is huge and fast-unfolding, and competition is fierce. With so much on the line, each network prepares extensively, beginning years before the presidential vote. They hire experts, spend lavishly on dazzling graphics, design eye-catching sets, and do more research than a Ph.D. requires. The mission is simple: Get it right.
But they didn’t.
At 7:49 p.m., NBC called Florida as a win for Gore. CBS followed suit one minute later. Fox News Channel, in the presidential projection business for only the second time (they launched in October 1996), chimed in at 7:52 p.m., joined by The Associated Press at 7:53 and CNN at 7:55. The decision came before the polls in Florida’s panhandle (which is in Central Standard Time) were closed. ABC was more cautious, and anchor Peter Jennings waited until 8:02 p.m. to pronounce Gore the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes.
Then came the retractions. Maybe Gore wasn’t the winner. At 9:54 p.m., CBS stripped Gore of his win and sent the race into the undecided column, as did the other networks within about half an hour.
By 1 a.m., it was clear that whoever carried Florida would be the next president of the United States.
At 2:10 a.m. in Fox’s New York studio, election analysts saw the same data that the other networks were scrutinizing. The data indicated (incorrectly, it turned out) that there were only 179,713 outstanding votes. Analysts all knew that Gore would need 63 percent of those to win. It seemed an impossible task.
Enter John Ellis, then 47, head of FNC’s election-decision team and first cousin of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and George W. Bush. His mother is the sister of former President H.W. Bush. Ellis decided it was statistically impossible for Gore to win. He advised the network to call Florida for his cousin.
At 2 a.m., Ellis called his cousins and told them the news. “Their mood was up, big time,” Ellis told The New Yorker in its November 20, 2000, issue. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth — me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”
So at 2:16 a.m., Fox anchor Brit Hume announced that Bush would be the next president. Fox led the way, and one after the other, the networks tumbled like so many dominoes — CBS and NBC at 2:17 a.m., CNN at 2:18 a.m. And ABC, again last, at 2:20 a.m.
In Nashville, Gore headed toward an audience of his supporters to make a concession speech.
Dan Rather at CBS was bursting with Ratherisms. “Before the trail goes completely cold, let’s give a tip of the Stetson to the loser, Vice President Al Gore,” said Rather, “and at the same time, a bit tip and a hip-hip-hooray and a great big Texas howdy to the new president of the United States. Sip it. Savor it. Cup it. Photostat it. Underline it in red. Press it in a book. Put it in an album. Hang it on the wall. George Bush is the next president of the United States.”
An hour later, Ellis got the same message the other networks got: There was a mistake in the data the networks were analyzing. But by then, the scenario was set: Bush is the presumed winner. Gore is the challenger. But in fact that wasn’t the case at all. The corrected data showed that Florida was simply too close to call. And the country would spend the next month waiting to see who the real winner was.
Fox had only 413,000 primetime viewers in 2000, but everyone was paying attention to the new network nonetheless. Jeff Cohen, author of Cable News Confidential and a former Fox media analyst, believes Fox set the stage in 2000 by its late-night call.
“They had a huge impact in the 2000 election on how the Gore-Bush post-election contest was perceived, not just by the public but by journalists and influencers,” said Cohen, who was a contributor for FNC’s News Watch from 1997 to 2002. “The frame was that Bush is the presumptive winner and Gore is trying to steal something. That was how the media framed it.
“Had the networks all said it was too close to call, the legal battle and the political battle in the ensuing weeks would have been entirely different. The more accurate frame is this election is ‘too close to call,’ which gives more legitimacy to a Democrat challenge to a Republican and less legitimacy to the Republican effort that said, ‘Let’s get this over with.’”