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Cavuto: How Fox News Became a Giant
NewsMax.com ^ | 6/24/04 | Wes Vernon

Posted on 06/24/2004 10:36:24 AM PDT by kattracks

Fox News Channel’s vice president and business anchorman Neil Cavuto argues in his new best selling book, “More Than Money,” that you can overcome tremendous personal or financial obstacles to make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

One chapter focuses on Cavuto’s boss, Roger Ailes, the man who built Fox News and its “fair and balanced” concept into the cable giant it is today. Ailes at first had to build his news organization with people who shared his vision. It wasn't easy.

Some media personalities and executives followed Ailes from his old haunt at CNBC, owned by NBC.

Cavuto says though the NBC leaders were unimpressed with the Fox effort, they did try to intimidate him.

“You realize there are legal remedies to recruiting our people,” an NBC operative told him.

“You don’t know the difference between recruiting and a jailbreak,” Ailes replied. “People are throwing out bed sheets over there. They are dying to get out of there.”

Cavuto says it's not easy breaking with the media establishment.

“There’s no doubt how vicious it is,” Cavuto (who has “seen it up close”) told NewsMax.

Still, Cavuto believes more journalists than you can imagine at liberal establishment media yearn to be free of the shacles of political correctness.

“More journalists than you know, when given the opportunity to join a news organization that allows free speech and free thought, will at least have a chance to be themselves,” he explains.

Though Fox regularly trounces the other cable news channels - CNN and MSNBC — in ratings, there are journalists and journalism professors who scoff at Fox as an upstart.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the journalism professors,” says Ailes (as quoted by Cavuto in his book). As for elite journalists, Ailes notes that “America gives them the freedom to do what they want, but they don’t mind attacking it every day. And yet, if somebody attacks journalism, they get their nose out of joint.”

With Fox having found the key to success, we wondered if will there be Fox imitators. Not likely, Cavuto tells us. “It just isn’t in their bones.”

Or as Ailes tells him, “CNN had 4,000 people and Bob Novak, and they thought that was balanced.”

Cavuto adds that for a would-be Fox imitator to work, “you’ve got to want to give the other side and not lip service” to such issues as letting people keep more of what they earn.

Cavuto notes that in journalism school, students are taught that the very basis of covering the news is to challenge the government at every step, including our brave military men and women in harm's way, which may explain the over-emphasis on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, while making al-Qaida’s far more horrendous beheading of an American a mere one-day story.

Cavuto cites some other examples of bias for NewsMax:

When President Bush rejected the job-killing Kyoto “global warming” treaty, TV viewers not tuned to Fox would have had to go on a deep, time-consuming search to learn the main reason he did so.

The treaty held the U.S. to the highest and most exacting air quality standards based on questionable science. Meanwhile, China and India got a “free pass,” with the U.S. paying 90% of the bill.

But as far as most big media coverage was concerned, the president had not signed on to the holy grail of “environmentalism,” and that was that.

In late 1995, there was a special congressional election in California. Going into it, the media portrayed the contest as a test of public reaction to the “Gingrich revolution” which had put the GOP in control of Congress.

When the Republican candidate won the House seat, that race suddenly diminished to zero importance. There was hardly a word of it, almost a complete news blackout.

Instead, the focus of the journalistic “lemmings,” as Cavuto calls them, was on the fact that on the same day, Jesse Jackson, Jr. won a special congressional election in Illinois, although there was never any question that the namesake son of the civil rights activist would win his Chicagoland district.

More recently, Cavuto notes, one newspaper was “shocked” at the national outpouring of emotion following the death of Ronald Reagan more than 15 years after he left office. “How stupid can you be?” was the popular business reporter’s rhetorical question. “This man registered with Americans on many levels. But they [newspaper editors] were shocked. The common man and the common woman proved them wrong.”

Here again, Cavuto’s point to NewsMax is borne out: The pack journalists are not intrinsically evil. It is just that many of them approach news with certain conventional wisdoms; complete with an attitude of “Doesn’t everybody think so?” that ignores anything “to the contrary of the consensus view.”

“People have a real problem hearing both sides,” Ailes observes. “I don’t and I don’t think our viewers do.”

Neil Cavuto's bestselling book "More Than Money" is available on Amazon and Bookstores everywhere

Next: Cavuto and the battles against the odds.



TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: cavuto; foxnews
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1 posted on 06/24/2004 10:36:24 AM PDT by kattracks
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To: kattracks

good stuff.


2 posted on 06/24/2004 10:42:57 AM PDT by RolandBurnam
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To: kattracks

I've always enjoyed Cavuto's program. For a small business owner without a college degree, I appreciate the "plain language" he insists on using, so that everybody can understand what ever topic is "up".

But my respect for him, real honest to God respect, began the day he explained why he wore an American Flag lapel pin.

"I'm an American first, a Journalist second".

I wish that was the universal standard on American programs that are news based.


3 posted on 06/24/2004 10:43:18 AM PDT by Badeye ("The day you stop learning, is the day you begin dying")
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To: Badeye
Cavuto is a prime example of optimism being a prime ingredient in success.
4 posted on 06/24/2004 10:45:16 AM PDT by cripplecreek (you tell em i'm commin.... and hells commin with me.)
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To: kattracks
The annoying thing is, Fox isn't all that righty. Their news isn't at all since, in large part, they're stuck with AP reports like everyone else. As for their editorials, they are righty - but it's the righty take on all the topics the New York Times thinks we should be talking about. That's good, but it's not really good enough.
5 posted on 06/24/2004 10:46:09 AM PDT by prion (Yes, as a matter of fact, I AM the spelling police)
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To: kattracks

I regard the press in this country to be on the same level as communist, socialist democrats, liberals, leftists, and trial lawyers. Lower than Whale s**t!


6 posted on 06/24/2004 10:47:39 AM PDT by RetiredArmy ( I am a Vietnam Vet, thus I am a war criminal according to Flip Kerry.)
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To: cripplecreek

"Cavuto is a prime example of optimism being a prime ingredient in success."

Yep. My company's existence is proof.


7 posted on 06/24/2004 10:48:14 AM PDT by Badeye ("The day you stop learning, is the day you begin dying")
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To: Badeye

Isn't being a small business owner awesome? I love it and can't imagine working for a crabby boss ever again!


8 posted on 06/24/2004 10:48:49 AM PDT by HitmanLV (I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.)
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To: HitmanNY

"Isn't being a small business owner awesome? I love it and can't imagine working for a crabby boss ever again!"

Yes it is. We opened our doors in November of 1997, and for the next three years I never worked harder in my life.

I keep a series of photo's from our first office space hanging on the corkboard immediately to the left of the computer screen on my desk. It was.....sparse, to say the least.

Since January of 2000, we have been in a building we bought and paid for, haven't looked back since, except to remind myself where we came from, and how we got "here".


9 posted on 06/24/2004 10:54:04 AM PDT by Badeye ("The day you stop learning, is the day you begin dying")
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To: kattracks

The success of Fox is not so much that they have a conservative bias (they do have a mild conservative bias but its nowhere as pronounced as the liberal bias at other networks), but rather that they let cogent, well spoken, and engaging conservatices TALK.

For decades the other networks would consistently set up straw men as conservative spokespeople. Well meaning, but easily befuddled and otherwise unimpressive conservatices would be pitted against slick, trained liberals. The result was that the conservative message rarely if ever was communicated.

Fox balances that, that's all. It's amazing to me that the real thing that upsets liberal critics of Fox News is that Fox simply lets the conservative message accross (along with the liberal message). Heavens, we can't have that!


10 posted on 06/24/2004 10:54:45 AM PDT by HitmanLV (I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.)
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To: Badeye

Kudos and congrats!


11 posted on 06/24/2004 10:55:57 AM PDT by HitmanLV (I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.)
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To: prion

"The annoying thing is, Fox isn't all that righty."

Correct. Any network that employs both Rivera and Van Sustren can't be labeled "right".

It only seems that way because for the last forty years we have only gotten to hear one side of any political debate courtesy of Uncle Walter, and the Big Three.

Thankfully, Fox News came along at just the right moment in television and American history. Sorta like Ronald Reagan in 1980 in my view.


12 posted on 06/24/2004 10:56:53 AM PDT by Badeye ("The day you stop learning, is the day you begin dying")
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To: HitmanNY

"Kudos and congrats!"

Thanks. The sucess we have realized is the primary reason I dislike liberals.

Let me explain. I fought, clawed, scratched to get to where I am right now, personally and professionally, and financially. The hard work of myself and the biz partner, not to mention the staff has paid off. Since 1999, we've literally "had it made", cash flow is great, sales are great, long term debt has been paid off in full.

Salaries are six figures now, as opposed the the $11 per hour the biz partner and I paid ourselves that first 18 months, putting all our money made on the debts incurred during the start up.

Then along comes Al Gore, railing against the "evil one percent".

I busted my ass to get where I am today. I'm not "evil", I pay my taxes on time, actually "early" against the advice of our financial advisors. I didn't ask for the governments help. I didn't take a student loan thats never repaid. I didn't apply for any special status based on being a vet, or race, or anything else.

We did it on our own.

And the Democratic Party in effect hates me, hates my biz partner for it. How dare we become sucessful without attaching ourselves to the government teat is basically what comes across loud and clear.

So when I hear a sissyboy like Gore, or now the laughable John Kerry talk about tax breaks for the rich, I want to beat the living hell out of both of them....ram one of their oh so trendy ski boots right up their ass. Wrap that $2,000 dollar mountain bike Kerry's wife's money bought him around his neck.

These POS have no idea what it takes to create a company, to create high paying jobs. They were both born with silver freakin spoons in their mouths, both understood the term "trust fund" at about the age I learned about sex.

And yet they feel the urge to beat up "the rich" as they describe anyone that makes more than $100,000 per year?

I grew up around money, even though my father was a Teamster. I know trust fund babies, most of whom are now grownup leftwingnuts.

I can't help detesting them, the Democratic Party in general. But, its fair and balanced. They really hate me too...as every DNC commercial reminds me, day after day after day.


13 posted on 06/24/2004 11:08:21 AM PDT by Badeye ("The day you stop learning, is the day you begin dying")
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To: prion
The annoying thing is, Fox isn't all that righty.

Maybe it annoys you, but not me. I want a news source that tells *both* sides of the story in its news content, not one that presents only partisan views, right or left. Partisanship is what news analysis and editorial pages are for. A news story should be just that: as "fair and balanced" as it's possible for reporters and editors to be.

I'm a little shocked by all the Freepers who think Fox should only present the "righty" side of the news. The object should be to inform, not indoctrinate -- an objective the so-called mainstream media have failed at miserably. As Ailes says: “CNN had 4,000 people and Bob Novak, and they thought that was balanced.” Fox has many Lefties on staff offering balance. I'd never want Fox to be as biased as CNN.

14 posted on 06/24/2004 11:12:33 AM PDT by Bernard Marx (Is Karl Marx's grave a Communist plot?)
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To: kattracks

We saw Neil and had him sign 4 copies of his book on Tuesday. He seems to be a really nice guy, witty, happy to be there, and truly pleased (almost surprised) that you are buying his book. He looked every person in the eye, thanked them and shook their hands.

His book is very good. It points out what is really important in life. I am also a cancer survivor and a small business owner, and found it inspiring. I got copies for me and Mr. G. and our kids.


15 posted on 06/24/2004 11:18:13 AM PDT by Grammy
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To: kattracks

It's the live car chases in L.A. - they do them better than all the rest.


16 posted on 06/24/2004 11:19:27 AM PDT by familyofman (and the first animal is jettisoned - legs furiously pumping)
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To: Bernard Marx
I want a news source that tells *both* sides of the story in its news content, not one that presents only partisan views, right or left.

If you're talking about news content, there shouldn't be "sides" at all.

Partisanship is what news analysis and editorial pages are for.

I clearly made the distinction between news and editorial content. I would say Fox's news reportage -- again, because they're largely dependent on AP -- is slightly left of center.

Put it this way: Fox news talked about Abu Ghraib every day CNN did. The fact they may have had a different viewpoint doesn't get around the fact that the left is still controlling what we talk about and how long we talk about it. I don't want both sides of Abu Ghraib every day for a month.

17 posted on 06/24/2004 11:32:28 AM PDT by prion (Yes, as a matter of fact, I AM the spelling police)
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To: prion; RetiredArmy
The annoying thing is, Fox isn't all that righty. Their news isn't at all since, in large part, they're stuck with AP reports like everyone else. As for their editorials, they are righty - but it's the righty take on all the topics the New York Times thinks we should be talking about. That's good, but it's not really good enough.
If you compare the way Fox News cited think tanks in the 1990s with the way congressmen cited them, Fox News was a bit to the right of the median Congressman. And by the same measure, the "mainstream media" were halfway between the median congressman and the average Democrat congressman. On the ADA rating scale . . .
A Measure of Media Bias
Joint study by faculty at University of Chicago and Stanford University |
September 2003 | Tim Groseclose,PhD and Jeffrey Milyo, PhD


I have been developing an explanation for that situation . . .

18 posted on 06/24/2004 11:51:23 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (Free Republic: the web site of record.)
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To: kattracks
“People have a real problem hearing both sides,” Ailes observes. “I don’t and I don’t think our viewers do.”

I do not know, I think I am ready for a total conservative news channel because I am absolutely sick of liberals.

19 posted on 06/24/2004 11:54:39 AM PDT by Lady Heron
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To: Mrs Zip; BOBWADE

ping


20 posted on 06/24/2004 11:59:21 AM PDT by zip (Remember: DimocRat lies told often enough became truth to 42% of americans)
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