Stars and Clouds in the News Environment

The politics of musical chairs. . . .

You can’t blame young, largely unnoticed Fox News (say who?) for boasting about hiring Brit Hume, a Washington press corps VIP who got especially famous at ABC News while covering the White House for nine years and, since 1992, becoming a royal pain to the Clinton administration.

Smart move. He gives Fox News a face and a pedigree. Plus a power couple in Fox’s Washington office, in that his wife, Kim, is already its deputy bureau chief.

Few network news figures are better known than Brit Hume, who joins Fox News next month as its chief Washington correspondent and managing editor after 23 years at ABC. Besides covering major political stories, he’ll contribute analysis to various Fox entities, including cable’s infant Fox News Channel. John Donvan will replace him at ABC.

In addition to providing sorely needed experience, Hume delivers instant star credibility, which Fox News Channel now lacks but which epitomizes MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC News super-hybrid whose emergence in the 24-hour news channel field beside grizzled, battle-scrappy CNN this year preceded Fox’s by only a few months.

Whereas Fox News Channel is trying to earn respect largely with a corps of whosits and whatstheirnames, MSNBC regularly features a marquee of NBC News stars ranging from Katie Couric to Tom Brokaw. That doesn’t necessarily ensure smart journalism, for it was on MSNBC, as well as on NBC, that Brokaw made accusatory comments about then-Atlanta bombing suspect Richard Jewell, leading to the network’s recent legal settlement with Jewell over the incident. Yet experience can’t be discounted, and MSNBC’s greatest asset during this year’s presidential campaign was, indeed, the insightful analysis of former NBC White House correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

So, score one for Fox in the personnel wars. As a bonus, it also gets in Hume a reporter whose White House reports on ABC’s “World News Tonight” during the Clinton years often carried a tone of judgmental skepticism that surely made him especially attractive to his conservative new bosses, Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes. The latter has made his fervent mantra the ditsy notion of the media having perverted the United States by being a cesspool of lefty ideologues. Sure, as in ABC’s David Brinkley publicly calling President Clinton a bore.

Feeding that perception of raging liberalism, though, is the man coming to ABC News, departing senior White House advisor George Stephanopoulos. He joins the network next month as a political analyst and correspondent for a variety of news programs.

More star quality from another obviously smart guy.

Stephanopoulos is not the first government insider to jump to network news. ABC News star Diane Sawyer worked in the Nixon White House before being hired by CBS News, for example, and Pete Williams was State Department spokesman in the Bush administration, earning renown and respect during the Gulf War before getting his present reporting job with NBC News. Moreover, Ailes himself is a former Republican political consultant.

In general, though, government-to-press switcheroos do not bode well for news objectivity. How, for example, will someone as rigidly partisan as Stephanopoulos--who has spent so many hours in front of TV cameras being a good soldier defending the president and his policies--be able to shed his intense loyalty to Clinton in his new role for ABC News?

A prediction: He won’t.

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MUSICAL CHAIRS II. When the music stopped, Dennis Farrier no longer had a chair.

Nor did anchor David Jackson, sportscaster Gary Cruz, consumer reporter Bill Gephardt or general assignment reporter Barbara Matt, who also are out at KCAL-TV Channel 9 under new owner Young Broadcasting Co.

The one I’ll miss most, though, is Farrier, the station’s environmental commentator, who wasn’t even on the regular news staff. But his three-times-weekly reports were often remarkable: the sounds you hadn’t heard, a meshing of intelligence, compassion, eloquence and creativity unique to television in Los Angeles, if not throughout the nation.

Although Friday was his last day at KCAL, Farrier taped two additional pieces that were to run this week. Still resonating, though, is the one that aired Nov. 9, juxtaposing human suffering and animal suffering by intercutting video of skeletal African children wearing masks of flies and of South American women scaling mounds of garbage in search of food with horrific footage of animals at a slaughterhouse and of stiff dog carcasses slung into trash cans.

“I’ve been thinking about human rights and animal rights,” Farrier began, “and frankly, until humans get it right, until we learn to be civil to one another, until caring for one another becomes second nature, I doubt that the rest of nature stands much of a chance.”

It was typical Farrier--being provocative, giving context, providing insights and making unusual connections in a medium where such qualities are rare and where commentary these days is largely left to anchors making empty chitchat on the set.

“He was one of those difficult decisions that we had to make,” said Deb McDermott, executive vice president of Young Broadcasting Inc., when asked why Farrier was not being retained. “Dennis has done some great work, and there might be occasional stories we might have him work on. But when you’re making changes, you tend to keep versatile people and people covering lots of areas, not specialty reporters. And Dennis is more of a specialty reporter.”

Yes, not reporting crime and fires is increasingly the kiss of death in a field where team coverage is the highest priority.

It seems almost an accidental glitch in TV that an extraterrestrial as special as Farrier would have had such a terrific six-year run under former owner Disney and news director Bob Henry, who also is out under the new owner. And definitely a huge loss that Farrier’s voice has been stilled, making his brand of journalism as extinct in newscasting here as some of the species he reported on.