Fox news at 10: Love it, hate it, but can't ignore it
Few moments in Fox News Channel history seem to sum up the network's dilemma -- or its singular claim to entertainment value -- more than last weekend's Bill Clinton episode.
The site was `` Fox News Sunday, " the public-affairs show hosted by Chris Wallace, the ABC News veteran who decamped for Fox in 2003. The guest was Clinton, who had agreed to his first-ever Fox interview, provided half of the time would be spent discussing his charity work.
But a few minutes in, when Wallace asked the former president why he ``didn't do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business," Clinton leaned out of his upholstered chair and launched into a tirade, partly about his record in office, partly about the messenger.
``You did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me," he growled, demanding to know whether Wallace had asked the same question of Bush officials.
``Do you ever watch `Fox News Sunday, ' sir?" Wallace asked, when he could get a word in.
Clinton didn't say, but it didn't seem to matter. He answered his own question: ``I don't believe you asked them that."
With Fox, for many viewers, what you believe is what you get. And many people, it's clear, believe in Fox completely. The network, which celebrates its 10th anniversary Saturday , has risen past the skeptics to dominate cable news ratings. Though its prime-time ratings have slipped of late, Fox still routinely trounces CNN. ``Fox & Friends," the morning show, has ratings so strong that it has set a new goal: to beat the ``Early Show" on CBS.
But as notable as the numbers -- and sometimes out of proportion to them -- has been Fox's effect on the TV landscape, not just the viewers it has drawn, but the devotion and antipathy. Only a network with clout would draw so many complaints and not-so-loving parodies. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has made a staple out of criticizing ``The O'Reilly Factor," and Al Franken originally called his liberal ``Air America" radio show ``The O'Franken Factor." On Comedy Central, ``The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" routinely pokes fun at Fox's swirling graphics, and ``The Colbert Report" stars an O'Reillyesque host, jingoistic and prone to self-aggrandizement.
Left-wing groups, meanwhile, keep feverish running tabs on the network's conservative guests and angles. ``It's a right-wing, conservative, and, particularly, Bush White House propaganda mill," says Steve Rendall, a senior analyst at FAIR, a progressive media watchdog group.
Fox likes to tweak all of them back, in part with its in-your-face catchphrases: ``America's Newsroom," ``Fair and Balanced."
``Sometimes," says Bill Shine, Fox's senior vice president of programming, ``we do that just to annoy the other anchors."
That's the sort of player Fox has become, and the persona Clinton latched onto last week. ``You've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever," he told Wallace. In truth, it was just as easy to read the anchor's facial expression as bemusement. But Fox has created an image so clear, so defiant, that some find it hard to watch a single show without considering Fox as a whole -- or to watch Wallace or Brit Hume, another ABC News veteran, without thinking of O'Reilly. The network has a way, sometimes, of overshadowing itself.
So it was with the Clinton interview, which circulated widely online. Wallace says he got thousands of e-mails from viewers, few of them neutral. ``If they like Clinton, they hate me, and if they hate Clinton, then I'm a hero," he said by phone this week. ``And I think that's too bad. To me, that's everything that's wrong with American politics."
It is, however, a fact that has long worked to Fox's benefit. When tabloid mogul Rupert Murdoch created Fox in 1996 -- at a time when critics said the landscape couldn't sustain another all-news channel -- he marketed it as an antidote to left-wing news media. As its chief, he tapped Roger Ailes, who had been president of CNBC and, before that, a political strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
It was Ailes who spearheaded Fox's opinion-filled evening lineup and hired O'Reilly, a onetime Boston broadcaster who tends to declare guests ``right" or ``wrong." Viewers seemed to enjoy it; ``The O'Reilly Factor" is the top-rated cable news program. When O'Reilly broadcast from Faneuil Hall last month, as part of Fox's 10th-anniversary victory tour, the assembled crowd cheered him like a conquering hero.
These days, the network's producers and anchors vigorously deny any charges of political bias -- at least in the shows that don't feature O'Reilly or Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, who headline their own right-versus-left evening talk show. But many within Fox, Wallace included, say the network succeeds because it offers a different perspective, with ``different" defined variously as not centered in New York, or apart from conventional wisdom, or as a counterweight to a liberal bias that pervades other news operations.
``There's a pack mentality to journalism," Shine says, ``and people think that if it's on the front page of The
Media watchers have compiled ample evidence that Fox covers news differently. The Center for Media and Public Affairs, based in Washington, D.C., compared ``Special Report With Brit Hume" to similar shows across the dial and found that during the 2004 election cycle, John Kerry's overall TV coverage was nearly 60 percent positive, while George Bush's was more than 60 percent negative.
Except on Fox, that is. There, Kerry's coverage was 4-to-1 negative, and Bush's coverage was balanced.
The anti-Kerry statements didn't come from Hume or other Fox reporters, says Robert Lichter, the center's president, who does occasional paid work for Fox as a commentator. ``The question is what kind of a mix comes out of the sources who are interviewed," Lichter said. ``There's no question that Bush got more favorable coverage on `Special Report' than did Kerry."
Fox's coverage of terrorism and the war in Iraq has also been markedly different, the center found. During the heart of the war, compared with the broadcast networks, Fox showed 50 percent fewer stories with images of civilian casualties. After 9/11, Fox featured far more discussions about terrorism than CNN did .
That approach to the subject was one reason David Clark, executive producer of ``Fox & Friends," says he left a job at CNN to work for Fox around that time.
``Personally, I'm not a Republican, I'm an independent," Clark says. ``This was right after 9/11, and the whole view [CNN] took on the war on terror seemed so out of whack with what this country was and what we were trying to do and the enemy we were trying to fight.
``And to be honest," he adds, ``Fox is a hell of a lot more fun."
Yet it's the ideology question, as the Clinton episode showed, that often finds the network defending its straight news. Ailes told the Associated Press this week that Clinton's reaction was ``an assault on all journalists." Hume, speaking by phone from Washington, had high praise for Wallace's interview: ``The question Chris asked him was utterly and totally reasonable, and it's one that [Clinton] could have gotten, and should have gotten, from others."
Wallace points, as proof of his own fairness, to a Sept. 10 interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in which he asked such questions as ``Why didn't we finish the job in Afghanistan?" and ``Isn't it a failure to have allowed the Taliban to regroup?"
And Shepard Smith, the anchor of the evening news show ``Fox Report," points to his own reporting from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the way he sparred with the right-wing Hannity, who was anchoring the coverage, over the speed of the federal government's response.
``All right, Shep, I want to get some perspective here, because earlier today -- " Hannity had said during one live broadcast.
``That is perspective!" Smith had shouted back. ``That is all the perspective you need!"
By phone from New York, Smith said he hopes that moment was a turning point for viewers. ``It so happened that, on that day, there were millions and millions and millions of people who were watching us," he says. ``And they were stunned to find that all we were doing was being journalists."
Critics, he says, need to recognize that the network offers two different kinds of shows.
``The spin out there is Fox is up to no good, Fox is out to change the way people think," Smith says. ``Sean Hannity would like to, Bill O'Reilly would like to, Alan Colmes would like to, and that's fine. The day that there's something wrong with that, we need to close the doors on America. That's called freedom of speech. But the moment our journalists start to do something like that, please burn the building down. I'll carry the flag out."
But it's no surprise that viewers get confused, given the prominence of Fox's conservative hosts, says Bob Giles, curator of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation. ``I've seen some of their newscasts and I don't find them necessarily overly biased," Giles says. ``But when I view it, that's always in the back of my mind: the perception that the right-wing agenda sets the agenda."
And it's not clear that everyone at Fox draws a distinction between talk and news. Last month in Faneuil Hall, O'Reilly warned the audience not to cheer or boo his guests, so as to appear ``a classy program."
``We don't want to give that feel that we are an entertainment show," O'Reilly told the crowd. ``We're not. We are a news show."
Some of Fox's devoted viewers, too, don't seem to quibble about the difference. Some speak of an epiphany, centered on politics, that drove them into the cable network's arms. For Myrna Murphy, 52, of Eau Claire, Wis., it was the fact that Tim Russert invited Kerry to talk on ``Meet the Press," just after he lost the 2004 race. For her friend Mary Ann Minton, the conversion had come years earlier, ``after the Clinton administration and what he did to the office."
``I found that I loved `Fox & Friends' because they had the same values as I had," Minton said last month, standing in the crowd as the morning show broadcast live from Quincy Market. ``I try to get people to listen to them."
That isn't always easy. Minton had brought four friends to Boston, to celebrate her 50th birthday, when she learned that the show was in town. Two were eager to go to the broadcast with her. Two refused. Vehemently.
``We were in the hot tub last night and we had a political debate," Minton said. ``It almost ruined our friendship."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 
