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Posted on 03/01/2004 2:33:58 PM PST by bogdanPolska12
When Brit Hume, chief Washington correspondent and managing editor of Fox News, won the coveted Taishoff Award for Broadcaster of the Year from Washington's National Press Foundation, media colleagues cheered. Hume had been 23 years at ABC News, where he won an Emmy before coming to Fox, and his popular program Special Report is part of the lineup at what is now the No. 1 cable network. But there was a loud burst of dissent from one of establishment journalism's most grandiloquent divas.
Geneva Overholser, former watchdog ombudsman at the Washington Post who now oversees the prestigious Washington journalism program at the University of Missouri, resigned from the board of the foundation that granted the award because, she contended, it was besmirching the purity of her profession by honoring a newsman who engages in "ideologically connected journalism." In a letter announcing her resignation, and in subsequent interviews, Overholser slammed the Fox network. "Fox wants to do news from a certain viewpoint, but it wants to claim that it is 'fair and balanced,'" she told USA Today. "That is inaccurate and unfair to other media who engage in a quest - perhaps an imperfect quest - for objectivity."
In a column she later wrote for the Poynter Institute Website, she maintained, "Fox News is arguably the first mainstream, widely distributed news medium to leave the objectivity god behind. ... You can make a strong case for it, you can make a strong case against it, but you can't make any case at all until you acknowledge that it's happening."
Conservative and middle-of-the road critics wondered on what planet Overholser had been living. From their point of view, "ideologically connected journalism" has for decades dominated the "mainstream" broadcast networks and CNN. From the revolving door between Democratic politics and the mass media, to the Freedom Forum survey that found 89 percent of journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, to the flagrant labeling of conservatives or even "ultraconservatives," few were unaware that no conservatives need apply. Then things changed.
"It should be a settled view that the mainstream media tilt to the left except for Fox," says Ken Grubbs, former editorial-page editor of the Orange County [Calif.] Register and associate editor of Investor's Business Daily who is now director of the National Journalism Center. He favors a "Jefferson-Jackson model" of journalism, in which news organizations label their ideologies, and notes that many journalists have "a background laden with left-wing activism yet they parade as objective journalists."
As an example, Grubbs cites Rick Kaplan, a longtime Bill Clinton activist who was just hired as the new president of MSNBC. When he was an executive producer at ABC and president of CNN in the 1990s he became a Clinton intimate, played golf with the president and his family, and stayed overnight at the White House, where his daughter slept in the Lincoln Bedroom. Moreover, he had advised candidate Clinton in 1992 on how to handle reporters' questions about the Gennifer Flowers affair and brokered a deal for Clinton to appear on Don Imus' radio talk show in New York City just before the New York primary, according to Tom Rosenstiel of the Los Angeles Times. A Vanity Fair article says that at ABC Kaplan killed a story about the Clinton Whitewater scandal and softened a profile on Clinton by Sam Donaldson. When he ran CNN from 1997 to 2000, Kaplan severely limited reporters' use of the word "scandal" in connection with the Clintons, according to U.S. News & World Report. And in a commencement speech while at CNN, Kaplan asserted that Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating the Clintons, "was putting obsession ahead of the best interests of the nation" and praised Clinton's "extraordinary" achievements. After a story he had approved about U.S. soldiers spraying nerve gas in Vietnam was exposed as false, and with ratings in a dive, Kaplan left CNN in 2000.
Given her concerns about "ideologically connected journalism" at Fox, does Overholser have any objection to Kaplan running MSNBC? When asked, she said simply, "I'm not giving interviews" about the Hume matter and declined to discuss Kaplan.
The heated reaction of Overholser and other figures of the old liberal establishment to the rise of Fox News may illustrate mostly that the ground is shifting in TV news from broadcast to cable, say media specialists. The percentage of the audience that gets its news from cable rather than broadcast networks now is about 60 percent. And it appears that consumers are savvy about getting what they want from the 24-hour news channels. "The world is moving away from the big broadcast news half-hour national shows," Fox News vice president and founding Washington bureau chief Kim Hume tells Insight in an interview from the Fox newsroom on Capitol Hill. "I think people who care about it gradually are shifting to the cable networks to get their news and not waiting until 6 or 6:30 every night to hear from Tom Brokaw, for example."
Fox Broadcasting, the network parent of cable-based Fox News, had its latest triumph in beating the three major networks in the ratings for coverage of President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech in January by using its cable-news personnel, real journalists, to cover the address for the network's stations. But Hume does not see the company expanding its broadcast news beyond major events, because she says the future is in cable news. The 24-hour news cycle of the cable networks allows news consumers to get more sides of the story than ever before, she emphasizes. "They get better and more information watching cable news than they ever do watching broadcast news," Hume says.
The growing importance of the cable-news channels has increased the interest of consumers in knowing which cable network is most reliable in getting the story first, getting it right and reporting it in context. Because there is so much programming, this is a hard call. But by interviewing media experts and carefully reviewing network segments, Insight is prepared to make the following calls. The best cable networks in terms of coverage and fairness are (1) Fox News, (2) CNN and (3) MSNBC.
Placing MSNBC last was a difficult call to make. It's difficult to rate MSNBC at all, because the network changes its format and personnel so frequently. Robert Lichter, president of the watchdog Center for Media and Public Affairs, says he frequently doesn't include the network in his group's studies because "they keep changing from week to week."
For a while the word in the industry was that MSNBC was trying to "outfox Fox" with programming that appealed to conservatives. Many conservatives do enjoy Scarborough Country, which is hosted by former congressman Joe Scarborough, a Florida Republican. But current signs are that conservatives are being booted. The network did not renew the contract of Dr. Bob Arnot, whose crisp and compelling segments frequently emphasized good news in Iraq's reconstruction, and apparently forced out one of Scarborough's producers who had criticized gloom-and-doom war coverage as false and unrealistic. And much of the MSNBC coverage of the Iraq war and the Middle East has been blatantly biased, say critics both left and right. Current speculation from conservative groups such as the Media Research Center (MRC) and Accuracy in Media is that with Kaplan coming aboard, the network may try to position itself as an openly liberal alternative to Fox's perceived conservatism in a desperate bid to gain a point or two in the ratings.
In the meantime there is concern among conservatives and centrists that as Fox brings in more celebrities from the other networks liberal bias will arrive with them. This happened at CNN, which in its first few years as a network in the 1980s was regarded by conservatives as more fair than the liberal broadcast networks. As it became more popular, network veterans came aboard, bringing their blue-states perspectives with them to Atlanta. "Generally, the more stars they got, the more biased they became," says Tim Graham, MRC's director of media analysis. The MRC noted that CNN anchor Judy Woodruff, a liberal veteran of PBS, recently let Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry get away with stamping criticism of him by fellow Vietnam veterans as a pack of "lies." She didn't press him on the reckless charges of alleged brutality with which Kerry tarred all veterans of the war in his Lenin's Birthday testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971.
However, Graham says, the growing number of stars at Fox News has not yet translated into more bias. He notes that Chris Wallace, a new hire from the broadcast networks and son of CBS legend Mike Wallace, is one of the few to ask candidate Kerry to explain his 93 percent liberal rating by Americans for Democratic Action, which gives Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D-Mass.) only an 88. This is in keeping with the network's long-standing tradition of identifying liberals and conservatives.
That stands in contrast to other networks, which are quick to label conservatives and "ultraconservatives" while covering for radicals and leftists. For instance, on Feb. 22, CNN's Bob Franken reported a critique of Bush by the Union of Concerned Scientists as if it were scientific writ. That group consistently has taken radical, anti-American and far-left positions, including support for a nuclear freeze at the height of the Cold War, but Franken used no adjective to describe the Berkeley, Calif.-based group's infamous agenda, not even "liberal." On the other side, on MSNBC, NBC News reporter David Gregory described Bush's mild February criticism of Kerry's shifting of positions as part of "a very hard-right campaign that he's preparing to run." One searches in vain to find a reference to Democrats running a "hard-left" campaign. "According to all the networks except Fox," Graham says, "the great ideological battles of our time are between ultraconservatives and moderates."
Fox's labeling policy is "to give people context," says Kim Hume. "It's like, 'consider the source,' so people know where it is coming from and can make their own decisions." A CNN spokeswoman says her network "strives to be fair," but didn't get back to Insight by press time about what the network's practices are for on-air identification of sources. MSNBC did not return any of Insight's phone calls.
And full identification is important at Fox because the network has both conservative and liberal guests. The liberal media-watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting put Brit Hume's show in the middle for guest selection in war coverage in 2003, noting that it had more antiwar guests than PBS or CBS. Among Hume's guests were left-wing Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Pete Stark (D-Calif.). An article in Columbia Journalism Review found Fox's news stories to be "straightforward, with little hint of political subtext except for stories the news editors feel the mainstream press has either downplayed or ignored." Graham notes that Fox covers negative stories about Bush, such as the bizarre Democratic complaints about his service in the National Guard, and it even broke the story of his youthful citation for drunken driving, which many pollsters cited as suppressing Bush's popular vote in 2000. Even popular Fox host Bill O'Reilly, often labeled a conservative by those on the left, opposes the right on litmus issues such as abortion restriction, gun control and the alleged threat of global warming.
The difference, experts agree, is that Fox goes for stories the establishment-liberal networks don't think are news. Kim Hume says one of the reasons she left network news at ABC was the conformity in thinking there. "I was a lone ranger," she says. "That groupthink really annoys me!"
Groupthink on the war in Iraq seems to be showing badly at MSNBC. Not only did the network not renew the contract of Arnot, it apparently pushed out Noah Oppenheim, who produced Scarborough Country and then Hardball, after he wrote an article for The Weekly Standard complaining that media coverage of the war was too negative. According to the New York Observer, Oppenheim left after NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and his executive producer complained openly that the article was unseemly.
The watchdog Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, meanwhile, has noticed a bias in the network's Middle East reporting. "MSNBC, the joint cable network of Microsoft and NBC, has been notably tilted against Israel in its recent coverage, filling up hours of airtime with hackneyed reports on topics like the supposed difficulty of distinguishing 'freedom fighters' from terrorists, and making grotesque comparisons between the 'aging warriors' Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat," the group's analysis says.
Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media and others say that the bias is almost institutional at CNN. Conservatives are fairly represented on the talk shows there, and the network does still give conservatives overall more airtime than the old broadcast networks. Also, founder Ted Turner, who has strong liberal views on the environment and foreign policy, has much less power over programming now that the cable network has been taken over by Time Warner. But at MSNBC, especially with Kaplan on board, there is concern that programmers actively will be carrying out an agenda. Both Kincaid and Graham say Scarborough might not survive under Kaplan. And with the recent ousters of conservatives and supporters of the war on terror, Kincaid wonders if MSNBC might be trying to "beat Al Gore to the punch" in starting an all-liberal network. "With Kaplan there, you have to wonder," says Graham.
John Berlau is a writer for Insight. email the author
Is it me or is this argument completely circular? This woman used to write a column for some newspaper in Minnesota that was so left wing it was boring.
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