Fox’s Carl Cameron raises Democrats’ ire

“I’m a metrosexual -- he’s a cowboy.”

“Women should like me. I do manicures!”

“Didn’t my nail and cuticles look great?”

-- Quotes falsely attributed to

John F. Kerry on FOXNews.com

In the larger scheme of things, the fake quotes posted on the Fox News website following the first presidential debate look like the adolescent silliness that strikes many a campaign-weary journalist at the end of the trail. But not to the activists supporting Democratic candidate Sen. John F. Kerry, or opposed to Fox News Channel.

“We called on a large chunk of our 2.8 million members to make phone calls calling on Fox and Roger Ailes for Carl Cameron to be fired,” says Noah T. Winer, the “Fox campaign director” at MoveOn.org, the online political action organization funding pro-Kerry ads and underwriting the anti-Fox documentary “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.”

The controversy over the quotes -- which were part of a fake script, written by Cameron, that Fox says was inadvertently posted on its website -- is not the first incident that has led the organization to take aim at Cameron, Fox News Channel’s chief political correspondent. One of the more striking images in “Outfoxed,” released theatrically in August, is of Cameron shamelessly buttering up then-Gov. George W. Bush in pre-interview chitchat. In the clip, which was slipped to the filmmakers by a Fox employee, a boyishly eager Cameron gushes about his then-wife’s work with Bush’s sister Doro in the 2000 Bush campaign: “My wife has been hanging out with your sister.... She’s been all over the state campaigning and Pauline has been constantly with her....” The two stop smiling and switch character the second the interview officially starts.

“In journalistically based news organizations, people get taken off a beat for much less,” Winer says.

Cameron later said he was embarrassed and admitted he had exaggerated. He also said in an interview with the New York Observer that the clip had been edited to make him look bad. Cameron, who has two children, has since gotten divorced from his wife Pauline, according to the Observer article.

In a race where media bias has become an issue, Cameron “is particularly unfit to be covering a campaign in which he’s twice exposed his partisan preference,” Winer says.

Fox News is unmoved. “Carl’s still on the beat,” Fox News spokesman Paul Schur says. “He’s been reprimanded and we’re moving on.”

Cameron, 43, did not respond to messages left with Fox. He has said previously that he works hard to ensure his reports are fair. And he’s earned generally high marks from the Kerry campaign. After the fake quotes were posted, campaign spokesman Mike McCurry issued a brief statement: “Fox News Channel admitted its mistakes. If George Bush could do the same, maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today in Iraq.”

As a news reporter, Cameron has, at least until now, avoided the ideologue tag that has stuck to Fox News commentators Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Just before the 2000 election, Cameron was the first to break the story, on Fox News, about Bush’s 1976 drunk driving arrest.

“Carl’s strengths are that he works incredibly hard and has a real love for the political game,” says Howard Kurtz, a Washington Post columnist who has followed Cameron’s career. “His weakness is that he can get a bit cocky and sometimes shoot himself in the foot.

“What Carl Cameron did was a stellar example of incredibly poor judgment in the midst of a presidential campaign. But if every reporter who privately made fun of a candidate was dismissed, our newsrooms would probably be empty.”

A New England native with an MBA from Boston University, Cameron was working as sales manager for a radio station in New Hampshire when his deep voice made him the logical choice to fill in for the weatherman. He later became the political director for New Hampshire’s television station before joining Fox as its Capitol Hill reporter.

Like many of the media flaps, great and small, that have cropped up this political season, the fake-quotes controversy surfaced thanks to a blogger. Josh Marshall, a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., and sometime guest on Fox News Channel, first reported on the “metrosexual” posting on his website talkingpointsmemo.com after he was tipped by a Kerry supporter.

The fake quotes, Marshall says, are “in some sense silliness from an organization whose bias is an open secret.” Echoing the theme of “Outfoxed,” a September report by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found news about Kerry on Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” was five times more negative than broadcast news reports. However, Fox also reported negative news about Bush in equal amounts to the broadcast channels.

After his appearance in “Outfoxed,” an anti-Cameron move was inevitable, says Matthew Felling, media director at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for the Media and Public Affairs. “After the footage of him chumming up with George Bush, Carl Cameron became a marked man,” he says.

Cameron may have acted foolishly, Felling said. But his worst sin, according to Felling, is that he violated the cardinal rule of D.C.: “Never write anything when you can say it. Never say anything when you can wink.”