Phil Brennan
Friday, June 29, 2001

Five years later the bug has grown into a monster that's devouring Turner's CNN.

Upstart Fox News Channel's viewership has jumped an astounding 430 percent over the last three years while rival CNN has declined by 28 percent, and those numbers alone were sufficient to make the New York Times sit up and take notice.

Notice, that is, that Fox allegedly leans to the right - an offense intolerable to the daily bible of Marxist liberalism that has somehow convinced itself that, despite its notorious leftist bias, it is really a paragon of virtuous nonpartisanship.

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, writer Marshall Sella set out to examine Fox's claim that unlike the mainstream media, its reporting is fair and balanced, words he cannot avoid likening to a fictitious German word that sounds suspiciously like something coined by Herr Goebels, Hitler's propaganda minister.

"In the culture of Fox News," he wrote, "those three words have been used with such numbing repetition in the past five years that they now sound like a single noun, like a German policy initiative: Fairenbalinst."

Obviously unaware of the inescapable connection, later he quotes Fox's anchorman Brit Hume about an incident from the 1992 presidential election during a Bush Sr. appearance in Oklahoma. "'You had these fresh-faced kids whose politics probably weren't extremely well formed" Hume told Sella. "And the president doesn't visit a Bible college every day. So he comes out onto the platform and they break into extraordinary cheers. And one of my colleagues leans over to me and says" - here, Hume inserts a pause to telegraph the disgracefulness of the remark - Sieg Heil.' "

As disgraceful as Fairenbalinst, Mr. Sella?

Aside from these obligatory slams at what the effete Times considers Fox News’ lowbrow, non-liberal policies and format, Sella does a workmanlike job at describing the structure and background of Murdoch’s growing cable network.

The gist of Sella’s thrust is the matter of Fox’s alleged conservative bias. He quotes Roger Ailes, the genius behind Fox’s astounding success: "In most news" he says gruffly, "if you hear a conservative point of view, that's called bias. We believe if you eliminate such a viewpoint, that's bias. If we look conservative, it's because the other guys are so far to the left. So if we include conservatives in our promos sometimes, well ... tough luck!"

Whatever the slant, however, in its fifth year of existence, Ailes has taken Fox to the point where its value is estimated to be a staggering $3 billion. Sella notes that three of the top five cable news shows in prime time are Fox programs and, he adds, has been No. 1 in that time block for nearly seven months. Moreover, in the 65 million households where Fox News and CNN compete in prime time alone, head to head, Fox is winning by nearly 30 percent.

The locus of Fox's viewership is mostly among those residents of so-called "red" states - the huge area between the two coasts that went overwhelmingly for Bush last year. The average viewer there is a 57-year old who earns a comfortable $57,880 a year, which Sella says is the highest income of any viewership except that of the financial network CNBC. They consider themselves to be religious and are bitterly opposed to what they perceive to be the media’s overwhelmingly liberal slant.

Says Ailes: "Journalism became a mechanism of advocacy in the '60s. These days, the Gore states are the intelligentsia; the red states are regarded by these people as morons. The intelligentsia would like you to go ahead and send your money to them, and they'll spend it for you, because you're too stupid to do it yourself. That's absolute-elitist-horse-dung-Socialist thinking!"

"This is a large and loyal audience," Murdoch, whose News Corp. founded FNC, told Sella. "Coverage was becoming more and more biased, and people were starved, starved for an alternative."

Fox has provided that alternative, and has been rewarded with success to an extent that would have been considered to be impossible to achieve when the network went on the air. When Fox made its debut, CBS, ABC and NBC along with CNN each had budgets about 10 times that of Fox News, Sella recalls. CNN had a staff of roughly 3,500 people; Fox began with 700. CNN had 30 bureaus in the States and abroad, Fox had a mere nine.

Ailes began with a plan to make his new network stand out. He sent memos to his reporters and editors to "tell both sides of every story and take stories to the 'next level' of information.

In Sella’s words, "this was pitched as a standard so exacting that no network had dared try it in the past. Embedded in this discourse about 'reporting stories that competitors don't cover' was a word one rarely sees in memoranda: haven. Ailes sought, in his fractured prose, to "position cable channel as haven for viewers looking for relief from the one-sided reporting by competition."

The plan has paid huge dividends in profit and audience size, and there’s still more to come.

Said Murdoch: "We're a work in progress. As we get into greater profit, I expect to add bureaus. We need to be the network to break stories first. There's just a long way to go."

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Media Bias

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