11/28/00 10:15 a.m.
Ker-Plotz!
The Fox factor.

By Tim Graham, research director, Media Research Center

onservatives have been documenting the liberal bias of the TV networks for at least three decades. In her book The News Twisters, author Edith Efron chronicled how the networks favored Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential race. So perhaps we should watch patiently as liberals attempt the baby steps of complaining about conservative media bias. The primary liberal target is the Fox News Channel, which is the hottest phenomenon in cable television, a growing powerhouse that is crushing MSNBC (which is a film-clip festival of celebrity interview repeats outside major political crises) and costing jobs at an increasingly nervous CNN (namely Clinton golfing buddy/ex-CNN president Rick Kaplan).

Fox's founding declaration of difference was to announce the slogan "We report, you decide." This is a shocking deviation from the liberal media modus operandi, which is marinated in the impatient belief that the American people are too politically unreliable to be allowed to make decisions for themselves. With that slogan in the air, liberal media critics like the Columbia Journalism Review quickly announced the discovery of a media-bias problem — but only at Fox. With the politeness that only an insular clique can muster, somehow the rest of the media had utterly rejected editorializing, except for these dastardly Republican-sympathizers that Rupert Murdoch was bankrolling.

In September, the New York Times noticed, with a story headlined "The Right Strategy for Fox: Conservative Cable Channel Gains in Ratings War.'' The Times later ran a correction that "the headline exceeded the facts in the article." Reporter James Rutenberg pointed out that "In critiques of Fox, it is usually noted that [Fox chief Roger] Ailes was a political consultant to Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush." But later, Rutenberg quoted CNN chairman Tom Johnson without any mention of his years of service as an aide to Lyndon Johnson.

The latest silly exercise in tunnel vision comes from Slate's David Plotz, who writes with characteristic liberal precision: "This ostentatious fairness is preposterous. The big three networks and CNN stifle any seeping opinion with a deadening evenhandedness. If you watch ABC news for 48 hours, you will detect a lefty bias in story choice and interview subjects. If you watch Fox News for 48 seconds, the righty bias will stomp you on the head." Plotz offered no specifics, no examples, no quotes. If the bias is so noticeable, couldn't the man at least tape an hour or two and give us an example? The transcripts are on Nexis. How hard could it be? To add to the fun, Plotz followed up: "TomPaine.com has dubbed Fox 'GOP-TV,' but that's too crude." Too crude? Cruder than "in 48 seconds, the righty bias will stomp you on the head"?

Fox takes this guff in part because of who their coverage attracts. Its convention coverage nearly trumped CNN during the Republican convention in Philadelphia this summer, but plunged during the Democratic confab in Los Angeles. The difference is probably hundreds of thousands of conservatives who wanted to see the Republicans without sneering Dans and Peters, but couldn't stand to watch the Democrats uncork a week of Old Democrat rhetoric. Plotz argued that Fox "is targeted not at the entire country but at the millions of right-leaning Americans skeptical of mainstream media. It is an assertive conservative tabloid."

Fox's popular evening talk-show lineup does feature feisty conservatives Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity (who is paired nightly with liberal Alan Colmes.) But these are not the "We report, you decide" hours of the network. What about its nightly newscast, Fox Report? What about its reporters, like David Shuster and Carl Cameron, who in the last few years have broken major stories on the Clinton scandals? Plotz admitted: "Fox also believes that critics unfairly lump its news and its commentary together and that its news deserves more respect, which it probably does."

But how does Plotz's "assertive conservative tabloid" theory match up with the reality that under Ailes, Fox has consistently hired away many familiar faces from — gasp — the liberal networks? Former ABC star Brit Hume may have the highest profile, but Ailes has also added NBC's Jon Scott and Linda Vester, ABC/NPR reporter Jim Angle, former MSNBC anchors Laurie Dhue and John Gibson, and CBS's Paula Zahn, who hosts her own nightly hour-long show called The Edge. As my colleague Brent Baker noticed in reviewing the "conservative channel" article in the New York Times, Zahn interviewed George W. Bush that week and asked: "But even members of your own party aren't crazy about your tax-cut idea. They think it's too big, even some guys running now in November for new congressional seats. They're abandoning you. Why?" Does this sound like a "conservative channel" in action? Plotz didn't ask or answer the question: why did the "conservative channel" join the other networks in the "Dewey Defeats Truman" mistake of calling Florida for Al Gore before the polls closed?

Plotz concluded by phonily applauding the addition of Fox: "Until now, we've been stuck with three absurdly evenhanded networks and a TV wire service. Cable has fragmented every other part of the TV market — we have a cartoon network, food network, history channel, etc. it's about time that the news fragmented too....Hooray for media bias — and for Fox, whatever dishonest slogan it adopts."

Fox News Channel should be analyzed, scrutinized, and criticized for how it reports the news. But Fox's critics seem incapable of detecting any on-air evidence to back up their complaints of overtly right-wing Republican bias. If liberal skeptics one day offer a real content analysis of Fox, they could really attempt to gain our respect and acknowledge that the other networks are not to be dismissed as "absurdly even-handed." The actual record of network coverage is too littered with liberal sermonizing to earn Plotz's backhanded compliment.