Straight from Van Susteren

Greta Van Susteren had about 90 seconds until airtime. But seated behind a crescent-shaped desk in a brightly lit studio on a recent night, the Fox News Channel host wasn’t paging through her notes or checking her makeup. She was responding to e-mails.

Her fingers flew over a laptop propped up on the desk, dashing off a response to one viewer about a development in the disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway in Aruba, a case she has followed closely for more than a month. She told another where he could send a letter of support to Holloway’s mother. A third gave her an idea for a question she posed to a guest later in the show: Just who was paying the legal fees for two of the suspects?

Van Susteren had already answered hundreds of messages earlier in the day, and there were still 2,821 unread e-mails in her inbox. That’s just the way she likes it; she gazed at the blinking screen with contentment.

“I much prefer to interact with the viewers than just talk at them,” she said. “It’s where I think the business is headed.”

At a time when the television news networks are cautiously experimenting with ways to pull back the curtain on the news-making process, the former criminal defense attorney has embraced a warts-and-all transparency as a hallmark of her 3-year-old Fox show, “On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren.”

She spends more than two hours a day answering e-mails, often culling the messages for tips that she incorporates into the program. She also conducts an online conversation with viewers through her blog, “GretaWire,” the most popular on the Fox website, drawing more than 150,000 hits a day.

In recent entries, she explained how bad audio quality marred a recent interview she conducted via videophone, posted e-mails from viewers urging her to dress better and wrote about her often fruitless efforts to extract information from the Aruban authorities.

Her online musings are written in the same matter-of-fact, blunt tone that characterizes her nightly show, which offers little of the sharply opinionated banter for which Fox has become notable. On air, Van Susteren’s persona is more dogged investigator than brash talk show host. She peppers guests with a series of open-ended questions delivered in the flat timbre of her native Appleton, Wis., often challenging an interviewee who makes a strong assertion by asking skeptically: “What is your level of certainty about that?”

The 51-year-old, who acknowledges that she’s politically more liberal than most of her Fox counterparts, has developed a strong following at the top-rated news channel, which she joined in 2002 after 10 years at CNN. She’s drawn an average of 1.5 million viewers so far this year, according to Nielsen Media Research, far outstripping the competition in her 10 p.m. time slot.

Her coverage of the Holloway case has been especially successful. In the last two weeks, her ratings were up 59% over the same period last year. “On the Record” has drawn an average of more than 2 million viewers on 18 nights during the last two months, beating out Fox stalwart Bill O’Reilly half a dozen times.

Van Susteren’s willingness to expose the behind-the-scenes workings and her dispassionate approach to stories make her an unusual star in the often-shrill world of cable news.

“She’s one of the straightest people doing legal analysis because the whole business has gotten progressively over the top,” said MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, who worked with Van Susteren at CNN.

Her measured style stands in sharp contrast to that of analysts such as former prosecutor Nancy Grace, whose heated interviewing tone on Court TV and Headline News has drawn both fans and detractors.

“I’m a little old-fashioned,” Van Susteren said. “I believe in the Constitution.... I don’t believe everybody arrested is guilty. I don’t believe everybody arrested is innocent.”

‘Scrappy’ personality

The former trial attorney, who came to prominence with her commentary of the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, never believed she would last long under television’s unforgiving glare.

“I don’t consider myself the glamorous type,” said Van Susteren, who -- even after a much-publicized eye-lift -- maintains a no-frills style. The diminutive host (she’s just under 5-feet-3) wears boxy blazers and buttoned-down blouses, even in the humid Aruba air. “It’s still a bit curious to me why I’m still standing.”

Bill Shine, Fox News’ senior vice president of programming, credits her “hard-working, scrappy” personality, noting that she brings a steely competitiveness to the job.

“She has a drive like almost no other,” Shine said. “She loves to win.”

With “On the Record,” Van Susteren is not limited to legal topics, and is often drafted to anchor coverage of major stories, such as last year’s presidential election. But she’s most in her element when she delves into trials and unsolved cases, like Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba on the last day of her high school graduation trip in May.

The Fox host decamped to the island for much of June and July -- flying back home to Washington on the occasional weekend -- and approached the story like a prosecutor building a case. She retraced the 18-year-old’s last known activities and scored exclusive interviews with the parents of the three boys who have been detained for questioning. Holloway’s mother and stepfather appear on the show almost nightly.

Some analysts view her focus on the Holloway story as symptomatic of cable news’ emphasis on entertaining stories over informative ones.

“It does strike me that the cable news industry is exploiting the story for ratings,” said Jeffrey McCall, a communications professor at Depauw University in Greencastle, Ind. “I think it would be hard for them to go on the air with a straight face and say, ‘This is important to you.’ ”

Some of her audience agrees. In a message Van Susteren posted on her blog last week, one self-described “avid viewer of Fox News” said she has stopped watching the program because of its incessant coverage of the Holloway story, adding: “I just wish there was other news you thought newsworthy -- like the war, London bombings, other missing children.”

Van Susteren did fly back to Washington to help anchor coverage of the London bombings and said she plans to devote significant coverage to the confirmation process of a Supreme Court nominee. Still, she said she understands why some disapprove of her focus on the story.

“You can put it in the National Enquirer and you trivialize it very easily,” she said. “But I can also make the argument that there are issues that are very interesting and fascinating. Just the emotional aspect -- this is a mother who is desperately looking for her child.”

Tenacious lawyer

Van Susteren describes her journey from the courtroom to the television studio as one of happenstance.

She first got a taste for law growing up in Wisconsin, where her father was a state court judge. After getting a law degree from Georgetown Law Center, she was hired as a research assistant by litigator John Coale, who was immediately struck by her tenacity.

“When she used to do criminal work, she would be all over the neighborhood looking for witnesses to know more about the case,” Coale recalled.

They married in 1988, and eventually opened a firm together. Both are Scientologists, a subject they declined to talk about.

“I don’t discuss money, sex or religion,” said Van Susteren, adding that she has not closely followed Tom Cruise’s recent remarks about the controversial religion’s views on psychiatric drugs because she’s been busy in Aruba.

Van Susteren won her first murder case when she was 27 and worked for almost 15 years as a defense attorney, trying “a lot of horrible, ugly murder cases.” She expected to spend her career in the courtroom.

Then in 1990, the CBS affiliate in Washington asked Van Susteren to provide legal commentary of then-Mayor Marion Barry’s drug and perjury trial. The next year she joined CNN to analyze William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial.

Still, she did not foresee the appetite viewers would have for watching attorneys dissect cases on television. When Court TV launched that summer, Van Susteren dismissed the notion of a 24-hour court channel as “a huge snore.”

But the Simpson trial four years later confirmed the interest in real-life court dramas, and Van Susteren’s analysis on CNN gained her a following. After the trial ended, CNN tapped her to host a daytime legal affairs program, “Burden of Proof,” and later a prime-time news analysis show called “The Point.”

She left in late 2001, dissatisfied with the management.

“I had many wonderful years at CNN,” she said, but added that her experience soured after Time Warner merged with AOL and the cable channel endured layoffs and a succession of executives. “The morale was so bad that it just wasn’t fun.”

Van Susteren approached Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and said she was struck by his straightforwardness. They sealed a deal with a handshake.

Her move to a channel with a reputation for a rightward tilt surprised even her close friends, especially since Coale -- a wealthy litigator -- is a major donor to Democratic candidates. Van Susteren herself was called a “Clinton apologist” by some conservatives during Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

But despite the unlikely pairing, she says she’s found the right fit at Fox.

“The difference here is that you have a management that stands behind you and you know that you have job stability,” Van Susteren said.

She demurred when asked if she believes Fox lives up to its “fair and balanced” tagline, saying, “I don’t agree with any news outlet on every new story or every guest that’s booked.” But she added that she does not feel any pressure to hew to a Republican line: “We don’t sit around in a dark room and drink Kool-Aid or anything like that.”

Van Susteren’s online postings are remarkably forthcoming about the inner workings of a channel known for zealously guarding its image. On Monday, she wrote in detail about the scramble that ensued Friday when a power outage at her Aruban hotel cut off communication with the New York studio a minute before airtime, forcing another anchor to open the show. On Tuesday, she included a slew of e-mails from viewers critical of her Holloway coverage, including one who wrote: “You, your tabloid tactics and your staff are nothing but a joke!”

She plans to expand her online offerings by posting interviews that don’t make the program and wants to be the first at the cable channel to podcast her show.

“Sometimes we do really stupid things and I put that stuff in too” she said. “I really have this thought that people want unvarnished news.”