Insider blows the whistle on Fox

[Pale Blue Dot]

http://poynter.org/forum/?id=thememo

The fact is, daily life at FNC is all about management politics. I say this having served six years there - as producer of the media criticism show, News Watch, as a writer/producer of specials and (for the last year of my stay) as a newsroom copy editor. Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox - including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America - did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

<snip>

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

And more, including Fox's response:

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/cl-et-rutten1nov01,1,234902.column?coll=la-headlines-lifestyle

Concerns about Fox, which styles its news coverage as "fair and balanced," begin with its owner, Australian-born Rupert Murdoch. The corporate boards and family investors who control most of the American news media generally feel obliged to maintain a wall of separation between news and editorial opinion. Murdoch, by contrast, operates in the style of the traditional Fleet Street proprietors, who dismiss such distinctions as inconvenient fictions.

And as a deeply conservative man, he is willing to put his money where his politics are: Murdoch, a naturalized U.S. citizen, subsidizes publication of the Weekly Standard, one of the country's most influential right-wing journals. According to a forthcoming book by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, he loses as much as $40 million a year maintaining the New York Post as an outlet of conservatism in Manhattan.

As Fox's founding president, he hired Roger Ailes, a shrewd Republican political operative who earned a well-founded reputation for bare-knuckle campaigning while working for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As one of the architects of the elder George Bush's media strategy in his campaign for president against Democratic rival Michael Dukakis, Ailes helped devise the notorious Willie Horton commercials. As he told Time magazine in August 1988, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."

The late Lee Atwater, another Bush aide, described Ailes as having "two speeds — attack and destroy." Before joining Fox, where he serves now as chairman, Ailes produced Rush Limbaugh's short-lived television talk show.

[livinontheedge]

1. And ;your point is????

I'm shocked and amazed that Fox is biased. Come on. People who lean right love the channel BECAUSE it is biased. They WANT it to be biased. They wouldn't watch it if it wasn't biased.

[leftchick]

3. .......and yet they claim it to be "fair and balanced"

like my faux watching, brainwashed Mom.....

[wabeewoman]

4. True

but there are a lot of people who watch without realizing the bias (I know, I know but it is true) These are the people who lose money on pyramid schemes and believe that if they can say it on the news, it must be true. So the more information getting out like this the better. I notice quite a few cartoons lately making fun of Fox news. The best thing that can happen is for them to lose all crediability with the general public. Then only the hard core RWers will watch them and they are trying to influence much more than that.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

5. Here in NW Arkansas

they have Faux on televisions in public areas, like lobbies of banks and in the eating areas of motels. I've talked with workers around them, and they tend to believe what is said-after all, it must be a good network or why would their employer insist it be on that channel?

[ithacan]

6. I KNOW people who think it's actually fair and balanced

some people do believe it. And they are not stupid people either.

This kind of story may be no big news at DU, but it's extremely important to publicize this kind of thing so that the general public knows that Fox is nothing more than a right wing propaganda outlet that is pushing this country in the direction of fascism.

[spooky3]

7. my parents are in this category.

[Don_G]

2. Faux Issues A Memo Every Morning

Instructing on how to slant the news that particular day and the insiders refer to the memo as their "bible."

Poynter's media coverage is pretty accurate.

[UTUSN]

8. & Faux "News Watch" - the Show This Hero Produced

didn't mention this flap AT ALL on today's program. This is supposed to be a "media watch" show, counterpart to CNN's "Reliable Sources". REINA was producer for this Faux show, and the Faux media watchers didn't raise a PEEP about this flap. I would think that questions about an entire network's "ideological interests" would be a subject for a "media watch" program, but---hey, ... (And, NO, I didn't expect them to, and wasn't surprised.)