How Fox News Plans to Challenge Cable’s Giant

Executives were wearing coats and ties for a 4 a.m. meeting Wednesday at the Manhattan headquarters of the Fox News Channel, the new 24-hour cable network. The session, which was followed by a run-through simulating the network’s first day on the air, was called by Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to impress upon staffers that they have less than a week before the “on” switch is thrown for real.

“This is tough--we’ve been building a worldwide news-gathering operation and a 24-hour cable news channel in five months,” Ailes observed.

The stakes are high for FNC, which launches on Monday with access to 17 million homes, including 10 million from Tele-Communications Inc. FNC is media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s entry into the cable-news sweepstakes against the well-entrenched CNN, from rival Ted Turner, and MSNBC, the network launched with 22 million subscribers in July by NBC and Microsoft Corp.

Murdoch, whose News Corp. has media holdings throughout the world, including the Fox TV network and movie studio, wants a national news operation in this country in part to help fuel his TV networks abroad.

But with the 16-year-old CNN already in nearly 70 million homes and MSNBC in 22 million, thanks to having replaced NBC’s America’s Talking channel, Murdoch has had to resort to buying his way onto cable systems already crowded with programming. He has offered cable operators a reported $11 per subscriber to carry FNC.

What intrigues many in the news business, however, is speculation over the content of FNC. Based on Murdoch’s statement that he found CNN “too liberal,” the newscasts on some of Fox’s local stations and his past involvement with tabloid journalism--including the Fox-syndicated show “A Current Affair”--the assumption among some TV observers is that Fox News Channel will be conservative and sensationalized.

“If Fox runs true to form, I expect the news channel will push people’s hot buttons,” said Larry Gerbrandt, senior cable analyst for Paul Kagan Associates.

Not true, Ailes said.

“We’re going to do the news; we’re going to be basically a hard-news network. We’re going to provide straight, factual information to the American people so that they can make up their own minds, with less ‘spin’ and less ‘face time’ for anchors. We won’t be sensationalistic--and people who are out there saying we’ll be a bunch of sleazy bastards are the same ones who said we wouldn’t be able to get on the air.”

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Ailes, who was president of NBC’s CNBC cable channel from 1993 until last January and created the America’s Talking network, has hired former CNN and ABC News anchor Catherine Crier to host a nightly interview program on FNC. Other principal anchors will include former CNBC anchor Neil Cavuto, who will oversee business coverage; former NBC and ABC anchor Mike Schneider; and Bill O’Reilly, who anchored “Inside Edition.”

Former CNN correspondent Jim Engle will be the chief White House correspondent, and Gary Matsumoto, formerly of NBC, will be a roving correspondent.

Behind the scenes, Ailes has hired former Time magazine bureau chief John Moody as editorial director for the network and former “Larry King” producer Tamara Haddad to head up Washington coverage.

“We’ve got liberals and conservatives on our staff,” Ailes said.

To help differentiate itself from CNN, FNC’s weekday schedule will feature 10-minute news updates on the hour, followed by 20-minute programs on topics such as health, religion and crime. Weeknights will feature hourlong shows that report on news of the day and interviews with newsmakers.

On weekends, there will be talk shows on sports and other topics, including an interview program hosted by book editor Judith Regan.

Although Ailes retired from politics in 1992, his background as a strategist for Republican candidates, including former President Bush, and as executive producer of Rush Limbaugh’s TV series, has added to speculation about Fox News.

But Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, said in an interview: “I don’t believe that Murdoch and Ailes can afford to fulfill the worst fears of their critics. I don’t know exactly what to expect of them--nobody’s seen their programming yet--but I know the quality of some of the people they’re hiring.”

“Roger has made it clear to me that he wants us to have people with a lot of different viewpoints from around the country,” Crier said, “and not cop out with the usual liberal-conservative sound bites.”

The launch of Fox News comes at a time of open feuding between Murdoch and Turner and of threatened litigation by the Murdoch side against Time Warner, which owns 20% of CNN and is merging with Turner Broadcasting.

Fox executives say they had a deal with Time Warner to carry FNC on Time Warner cable systems, and they believe that Turner had a hand in Time Warner’s recent decision to carry MSNBC instead. “We had an agreement, and they reneged on it,” Ailes maintained. Time Warner says there was no such agreement.

Meanwhile, Turner, who will be vice chairman of Time Warner when the merger is completed, assailed Murdoch last week, comparing him to “the late Fuhrer,” Adolf Hitler, and saying that Murdoch’s publications resort to “yellow journalism.” As an example, Turner cited a recent cartoon of Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin and negative coverage of the Time Warner-Turner merger in the New York Post, Murdoch’s tabloid newspaper. New York Post editors denied that their coverage was influenced by Murdoch’s ownership.

Ailes said there was no personnel influence from his boss at Fox News. “Murdoch has never once told me who to hire or who not to hire or what to say or do,” he said. “The only thing he’s ever said to me is, ‘Try to get the journalists to be fair and balanced.’ ”

Apart from questions about balance, Ailes has faced a daunting challenge in building a news operation practically from scratch. With a start-up budget of more than $100 million, he and his executives have hired about 600 employees, built studios in New York and opened bureaus in Washington, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Tokyo and London.

But CNN has bureaus around the world and a $300-million annual news-gathering budget. MSNBC draws on the resources of NBC News. And whether there is a market for three full-time cable news channels also must be demonstrated.

“I know there’s room for two,” said NBC News President Andrew Lack, “and we’re not going away.”