Cavuto: How Fox News Became a Giant

Cavuto: How Fox News Became a Giant

Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, June 25, 2004

Fox News Channel’s vice president and business anchorman Neil Cavuto argues in his new best selling book, “More Than Money,” that you can overcome tremendous personal or financial obstacles to make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

One chapter focuses on Cavuto’s boss, Roger Ailes, the man who built Fox News and its “fair and balanced” concept into the cable giant it is today.

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Ailes at first had to build his news organization with people who shared his vision. It wasn't easy.

Some media personalities and executives followed Ailes from his old haunt at CNBC, owned by NBC.

Cavuto says though the NBC leaders were unimpressed with the Fox effort, they did try to intimidate him.

“You realize there are legal remedies to recruiting our people,” an NBC operative told him.

“You don’t know the difference between recruiting and a jailbreak,” Ailes replied. “People are throwing out bed sheets over there. They are dying to get out of there.”

Cavuto says it's not easy breaking with the media establishment.

“There’s no doubt how vicious it is,” Cavuto (who has “seen it up close”) told NewsMax.

Still, Cavuto believes more journalists than you can imagine at liberal establishment media yearn to be free of the shacles of political correctness.

“More journalists than you know, when given the opportunity to join a news organization that allows free speech and free thought, will at least have a chance to be themselves,” he explains.

Though Fox regularly trounces the other cable news channels - CNN and MSNBC — in ratings, there are journalists and journalism professors who scoff at Fox as an upstart.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the journalism professors,” says Ailes (as quoted by Cavuto in his book). As for elite journalists, Ailes notes that “America gives them the freedom to do what they want, but they don’t mind attacking it every day. And yet, if somebody attacks journalism, they get their nose out of joint.”

With Fox having found the key to success, we wondered if will there be Fox imitators. Not likely, Cavuto tells us. “It just isn’t in their bones.”

Or as Ailes tells him, “CNN had 4,000 people and Bob Novak, and they thought that was balanced.”

Cavuto adds that for a would-be Fox imitator to work, “you’ve got to want to give the other side and not lip service” to such issues as letting people keep more of what they earn.

Cavuto notes that in journalism school, students are taught that the very basis of covering the news is to challenge the government at every step, including our brave military men and women in harm's way, which may explain the over-emphasis on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, while making al-Qaida’s far more horrendous beheading of an American a mere one-day story.

Cavuto cites some other examples of bias for NewsMax:

When President Bush rejected the job-killing Kyoto “global warming” treaty, TV viewers not tuned to Fox would have had to go on a deep, time-consuming search to learn the main reason he did so.

The treaty held the U.S. to the highest and most exacting air quality standards based on questionable science. Meanwhile, China and India got a “free pass,” with the U.S. paying 90% of the bill.

But as far as most big media coverage was concerned, the president had not signed on to the holy grail of “environmentalism,” and that was that.

In late 1995, there was a special congressional election in California. Going into it, the media portrayed the contest as a test of public reaction to the “Gingrich revolution” which had put the GOP in control of Congress.

When the Republican candidate won the House seat, that race suddenly diminished to zero importance. There was hardly a word of it, almost a complete news blackout.

Instead, the focus of the journalistic “lemmings,” as Cavuto calls them, was on the fact that on the same day, Jesse Jackson, Jr. won a special congressional election in Illinois, although there was never any question that the namesake son of the civil rights activist would win his Chicagoland district.

More recently, Cavuto notes, one newspaper was “shocked” at the national outpouring of emotion following the death of Ronald Reagan more than 15 years after he left office.

“How stupid can you be?” was the popular business reporter’s rhetorical question. “This man registered with Americans on many levels. But they [newspaper editors] were shocked. The common man and the common woman proved them wrong.”

Here again, Cavuto’s point to NewsMax is borne out: The pack journalists are not intrinsically evil. It is just that many of them approach news with certain conventional wisdoms; complete with an attitude of “Doesn’t everybody think so?” that ignores anything “to the contrary of the consensus view.”

“People have a real problem hearing both sides,” Ailes observes. “I don’t and I don’t think our viewers do.”

Neil Cavuto's bestselling book "More Than Money" is available on Amazon and Bookstores everywhere

Next: Cavuto and the battles against the odds.

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Media Bias