Cutting Across the Bias of the Fox News Channel

CNN was born in 1980 amid concern in some circles that Ted Turner, then a maverick conservative, would use his pioneering 24-hour-a-day news network to boost his political views.

A similar buzz greeted Monday’s arrival of right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch’s round-the-clock Fox News Channel (FNC).

One difference: Turner isn’t doing it, Murdoch is.

Or so it seemed from watching FNC most of Wednesday.

Perhaps the new network was just having one of those rare biased days, the kind that Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the conservative Republican who is FNC’s chairman and CEO, accuse mainstream media of having all the time on behalf of Democrats and liberals.

Or perhaps these two are, in their mind, merely evening the score, and Murdoch--whose media holdings in the United States also include the coarse and racy New York Post, the supermarket tabloid Star and Fox Broadcasting--actually does see his latest venture as a right-wing platform, despite denials from Ailes.

It isn’t yet much of a platform for news. Here was one of its headlines Wednesday afternoon: “Fox News Channel has learned that both vice presidential candidates will try to exploit each other’s weaknesses.”

One of its slogans, “More News in Less Time,” is a euphemism for shallowness, a quality that defines much of early FNC (its “Fox in Depth” segments being an oxymoron) and its uneven, youngish, relatively green editorial staffers. They range from able business reporter Neil Cavuto to a host of people (some of them alumni of Fox’s “A Current Affair”) who look as if they’ve gotten off at the wrong bus stop.

In fact, FNC is no more of an all-news channel than MSNBC, the schmoozing cable network launched July 15 by NBC and Microsoft. And it’s much less of one than CNN.

From 3 a.m. to 2 p.m., FNC presents 20-minute, single-topic interviews (“Fox on Trends” or “Fox on Crime,” for example) cluttered by unattributed visual Foxtoids (“One-third of all criminals wear disguises”) and bordered by news headlines. Then from 2 to 7 p.m. come the hour blocks: Cavuto’s business report and three individualized interview shows--”The O’Reilly Report,” “The Schneider Report” and “The Crier Report”--followed by “Hannity & Colmes,” a purported ideological clash between a conservative and a liberal that was preempted Wednesday night by FNC’s live coverage of the debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., featuring Vice President Al Gore and Bob Dole’s running mate, Jack Kemp. The rest of FNC is reruns of the earlier programs.

Although incredibly superficial, most of FNC’s regular news coverage was down the middle Wednesday. Yet. . . .

The lead guest on “The O’Reilly Report” was Billy Ray Dale, former chief of the White House Travel Office. Republicans have charged that the controversial firing of Dale and his staff in 1993 was part of a plan by Clinton and his wife, Hillary, to fill those positions with Democratic patronage pals.

The interview was notable for its heavy-handed slant. Host Bill O’Reilly, a former ABC News correspondent and most recently anchor of the tabloid series “Inside Edition,” aggressively prodded Dale to bad-mouth Clinton and the first lady. When Dale said he hadn’t paid much notice of the first lady when he was in the audience of Sunday’s Clinton-Dole debate in Hartford, Conn., O’Reilly was astonished. “If I was you I would have turned around and stared at her,” O’Reilly said.

When Dale said he felt no bitterness toward the first lady, O’Reilly told him, “I would be bitter. They really roughed you up as far as your life is concerned.” O’Reilly said that what the Clintons did to Dale was “outrageous.” When Dale vowed not to vote Democratic, only then did O’Reilly appear satisfied.

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Later, the lead guest on “The Crier Report” was conservative GOP cheerleader and renowned radio host Rush Limbaugh. Host Catherine Crier, previously a correspondent for ABC’s “20/20” and host of her own show on CNN, timidly sought to challenge Limbaugh a couple of times, but mostly seemed to enjoy tossing him straight lines and sitting back and listening to him ridicule Democrats and liberals.

At one point Crier suggested to Limbaugh that something the Democrats had done was good politics. “If you define good politics as lying,” he said. After laughing, she asked Limbaugh to explain Dole’s so-called gender gap. “These are women influenced by emotions,” Limbaugh said. After laughing, she asked him if he felt his criticisms were divisive. “If anyone is dividing America, it’s Bill and Hillary Clinton,” he said.

Case closed. In addition to makeup, Crier now wore Limbaugh’s footprints on her face.

Although under an all-news banner, these are talk shows, at least, a venue with a tradition of one-sided opinionating. Thus, more stunning was that afternoon’s “Fox on Politics,” a news segment featuring a lengthy taped interview of Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, by Tony Snow, a conservative newspaper columnist and host of “Fox News Sunday” on the Fox broadcasting network. It amounted to a partisan commercial for the GOP presidential ticket.

Snow himself did his best to make it one, not only by failing to play devil’s advocate while the first lady wannabe zestily praised her husband and demeaned Clinton, but also by putting words in her mouth.

This was typical. Snow: “Does it not frustrate you, the kind of media coverage you’ve been getting so far? It has to be personal. ‘My husband’s a better man.’ Isn’t that what you want to say?” She didn’t have to. Snow said it for her.

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No matter its political stripe, FNC’s emergence symbolizes the perils of channeling media influence into few hands. That applies not only to Murdoch, whose News Corp. presides over a virtual global village, but also to Disney’s ABC, Westinghouse’s CBS, General Electric’s NBC, the hybrid MSNBC and a myriad of other incestuous media unions in corporate America. And especially to the $6.7-billion purchase of Turner Broadcasting System Inc.--parent firm of CNN, Headline News, TBS and TNT--by Time Warner Inc. Murdoch’s nemesis and frequent target, Ted Turner, is vice chairman of this new cosmic behemoth.

In fact, Fox News on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Turner conspired with Time Warner to exclude FNC from New York. The suit charges that in signing MSNBC for its dominant New York cable system, Time Warner reneged on a previous deal to give that spot to FNC, thereby denying the Murdoch venture access to 1.1 million cable subscribers.

On Monday, meanwhile, TV listings in Murdoch’s paper, the New York Post, included his new FNC, but not CNN, a situation the paper later rectified.

So goes Godzilla vs. Megalon, while back on the ground, FNC was an early klutz, its stumbles including one comic interlude that found Jon Scott beginning a “Fox in Depth” segment about HMOs and medical care gasping for air, panting so hard and in such distress (he told viewers he’d just run into the studio) that you half expected a doctor he was interviewing to jump up and administer mouth-to-mouth.

Not that CNN’s own first steps weren’t undermined by goofiness, such as an exploding lightbulb setting Daniel Schorr’s clothes afire as he reported live from Washington, a cleaning woman walking past Bernard Shaw and emptying his wastebasket as he delivered the news and Kathleen Sullivan reading a story about a little boy coming home for Christmas after extensive surgery: “So this year, the Joneses will be able to open up their Christmas gifts--instead of little Johnny.”

Nor does MSNBC have its own act quite together yet, as evidenced by a wire service bulletin read Wednesday by Jodi Applegate about a French jet being five minutes overdue because one of its four engines was out of commission. “That’s a totally unimportant thing that I just told you,” she added. “But we tell you [it] because it’s crossing the wire.”

Crossing the wire a lot this week were stories about the Sun, a notorious London tabloid, admitting that it was “conned” into running lurid pictures from a fraudulent videotape purportedly showing a scantily dressed Princess Diana cutting up with riding instructor James Hewitt. The phony video bought by the Sun was run in the United States on CNN, NBC and MSNBC, an example of the growing seepage of tabloids into mainstream media.

The Sun, by the way, is owned by Rupert Murdoch.