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Posted on 05/02/2006 2:03:08 PM PDT by Republican Red
FOX News Channel launched in 1996, surpassed CNN in the race for ratings in 2002, and has been the most-watched news channel in the U.S. ever since. Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of FOX News and chairman of the FOX Television Stations, has spent his entire career in television, first as a producer, then as a communications consultant for three U.S. presidents and several senators and governors. Prior to joining FOX News, he was the president of CNBC. We met Ailes in his office and he talked about FOX News’s success.
WS: How did the idea for FOX News come about, and what opportunity did you see in the market?
AILES: Actually, Rupert Murdoch gets credit for having a vision that the American news market was underserved. He believed that there was so much sameness in television news because everybody seemed to be covering the same stories, and had the same take on the news. He deserves a lot of credit for the vision and for having the courage to put up the money to start the news channel.
He then brought me in and asked me if I saw the same thing, and I said I believed [TV] news was generally pretty boring, and the opinion polls showed most people thought the news was biased to the left. But regardless of how you saw it [a 24-hour news channel has] 168 hours to fill each week. That is a lot of news to cover, and how you select which stories to do, and how you are going to serve the public [are decisions that are] made at the news desk. And if every news desk is making exactly the same decisions, then the public is probably not being served.
We divide our programs into two different types: hard news, and we don’t add anything to that; and then we do news analysis, which every cable network does. Our news analysis forced others to include a broader point of view. We probably do it better than any of the others, because we found that after a major news event most people who watch cable news, or watch news at all, come to the FOX News Channel for the analysis. [In the print press] there is confusion between news and news analysis, but they are two different things—[and on television] it’s pretty easy to tell when people are offering opinions as opposed to facts.
WS: When the channel first launched, did you expect it would overtake the competition as quickly as it did?
AILES: I try not to get into any race or any fight that I don’t think can be won. I don’t expect it to be easy, however, and that’s the difference. I don’t do suicide missions, but I don’t mind difficult assignments. This was a difficult assignment, because we were taking on G.E. and Microsoft [MSNBC] and Time Warner [CNN] with about 30 percent of the resources and staff. So it was a pretty tough hill to climb. I thought we would tie them in five to six years. As it turns out, we tied them in four years, and then began to beat them in the fifth or sixth year.
WS: What is it about the channel that has attracted so many viewers?
AILES: Our on-camera people are better. We have a higher morale and a lower turnover of personnel. We do a broader range of stories. Our analysis treats more than one point of view with respect. Our creative director has done an excellent job with the graphics and presentation of the news. Our pacing and attitude is different, and we have not had to spend any time in the last nine years retracting stories.
WS: Are there plans to expand the channel internationally?
AILES: We are currently seen in 82 countries. FOX News is an American news channel, and we believe that the international audiences really want to see an American news channel. We have not set up an international channel which pretends to cover all the world’s news, because there are some 190 countries in the world, and if every country got their turn, they would probably get five minutes [of coverage] a day, which is not an international news channel. Al Arabiya is not an international news channel; neither is Al Jazeera or CNN International or BBC World. We are the FOX News Channel in America, so that viewers anywhere in the world see what Americans are seeing. We know that there are an awful lot of people interested in what’s going on in America and seeing an American news channel about international news. That is what we are, and we are the only ones doing it, so we are filling a niche.
WS: News operations are very expensive. How do you get the content and look you want on the screen and still contain costs?
AILES: We’ve done very well from the start. I came up through television-station operations, so I understand cost efficiencies pretty well. We have never missed a major story, nor have we ever not done a major story because of costs. But we also don’t believe that a bureau needs to be 10,000 square feet of cement and a [staff of people] waiting for news to happen. In today’s world, technology moves so fast [you can have] two people in the right place with an uplink. When the tsunami hit, we broke that story ahead of CNN, as I recall, and they had 50 times more people in the region than we did. We were on it and we moved fast and we brought what [equipment] we needed for that moment. As for transportation, when we needed to get into Tora Bora, [the reporter] Geraldo Rivera [offered] some guy $50 and talked him into flying a broken-down helicopter up to Tora Bora and got in a day ahead of CNN. We’ve always operated on a need-to basis. As long as I can maintain that spirit and intensity in the personnel, we’ll be fine. We also subscribe to international news services [that supplement our own coverage]. Occasionally, every news outfit in the world, I don’t care who it is, is either late or misses a story. But our [operation misses stories] no more than CBS, CNN or anybody else.
WS: What impact has FOX News had on the rest of the television news landscape and do you think viewers are now better served?
AILES: Clearly they are better served, otherwise we would have no ratings. If they felt they were getting served entirely by what was there before we arrived, they wouldn’t have bothered to pay attention to us because we didn’t really have any marketing money to launch the channel. We had $4 million [for national advertising] for the first year. A $4-million ad campaign can’t even cover New York City, generally. So we had to [attract viewers] on the basis of what we had on the screen, and there was obviously a need we filled.
When we launched and we said we were fair and balanced, an NBC executive called me and started screaming, “How dare you say you are fair and balanced? That implies that we are not.” And I said, “It’s not my fault that you have been in the news business for 50 years and never thought of those two words. Now suddenly they are on your radar screen, so that is good.” We’ve been an addition to information to the American people, and we have been an irritant to some of our competitors, both of which I’m proud of.
WS: How do you respond to the criticism that there is a conservative bias to FOX News?
AILES: Bias is not what you say; it’s what you eliminate. We don’t eliminate anybody. Everybody gets equal time. They do eliminate a conservative voice at many of these other networks, therefore we appear to be more conservative, because we treat the conservative point of view with as much respect as we treat the liberal point of view. We have as much bashing of the current administration over here. Bill O’Reilly harangues the president every night on our number one show—about the ports, about his brother in Florida—O’Reilly is an equal-opportunity basher! What I say [to the staff] is, have the facts and stay out of trouble. Our competitors had to pay off an anti-military documentary, or had to fire people because they made up the news, or because they didn’t listen to their own sources. We’ve had none of that, so therefore I think our journalism is very strong and they are wrong.
When they attack us—which of course drives our viewership up—they do it because it’s more of a marketing argument for them, trying to put us in what they think is a bad position, which shows how limited their thinking is. Because if they think that attacking someone for having traditional values or conservative thinking is going to raise their profile, that’s an odd thing. We allow our opinion people to attack whomever they want and say whatever they want, including our own company from time to time, including our own news channel. Even I’ve been attacked on our air!
WS: How did that feel?
AILES: You know what? That’s all right. They’ve got guts. One guy came in here and said, “I’m going to have to attack you.” I think he thought I was going to fire him on the spot. And I just said, “I know where you live!” I’ve been around 30 years, and I’ve never not had some attack at some time. It goes with the territory.
Ailes knows his stuff.
Looks like a good article, but I don't really have time to read all of it now. I'll read it later.
Other than comic relief, what could be of any importance at all coming from Juan Williams.
Ratner,Estrich, ugh.
I'd rather be watching test pattern.
"Our competitors had to pay off an anti-military documentary, or had to fire people because they made up the news, or because they didn’t listen to their own sources. We’ve had none of that, so therefore I think our journalism is very strong and they are wrong."
Brilliant.
Now if it would just get rid of or limit some of the reading material, . . . .
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