Murdoch's US news channel has never been exactly neutral. But revelations that its chairman secretly acted as an adviser to President Bush have caused outrage
Oliver Burkeman
Monday November 25, 2002
The Guardian
Fox News Channel - the US cable station owned by Rupert Murdoch that has been leaving CNN trailing in the ratings recently - has always taken a somewhat creative approach to America's cherished tradition of journalistic objectivity. Among the jaw-dropping elements in its unmistakably conservative line-up is Bill O'Reilly, the melodramatic commentator who has turned the savaging of liberals into a nightly blood sport enjoyed by around 2.6m viewers. Then there is Hannity and Colmes, purportedly an even-handed confrontation between a rightwing host and a leftwing host - except that the rightwinger is telegenic, presentable and articulate, while the leftwinger, oddly enough, is none of the above.
Through it all, Fox cheerfully declares itself entirely unbiased. Its slogans are "Fair and Balanced" and "We report. You decide."
So perhaps the US journalistic establishment should have been less shocked than it was last week when it emerged that, in the days after September 11, the channel's chairman Roger Ailes stepped outside his role as a purveyor of news and secretly acted as an adviser to President Bush.
In Bush At War, a new book by Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post journalist recounts how Ailes, a former Republican party strategist, sent a "back-channel message" via Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove. It warned, in Woodward's words, that "the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible. Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly." The message was given in secret, Woodward said, because "Ailes was not supposed to be giving political advice."
The New York Times - itself the favourite target of those who claim the American media have a liberal bias - was outraged. "Politicos who morph into journalists do themselves and their new profession no favour if they fail to shed their partisan habits," it scolded in a leader column. "Any other network news executive might have trouble keeping his job after a similar misstep. Mr Ailes will undoubtedly hold onto his post, given Fox's success in challenging CNN and MSNBC in the ratings."
Fox has, indeed, been a spectacular success with audiences, surpassing CNN in the ratings for the first time in January this year - apparently a beneficiary of the changing national mood post-9/11. British rightwing TV commentators, prevented by independent television commission regulations from emulating the likes of O'Reilly, view the channel with undisguised envy.
"If Sky News could emulate its sister Fox News, which has wiped the floor with CNN with opinion-driven 'fair and balanced' coverage, ratings would soon shoot past the Astra satellite," the Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn, recently hired by Sky, told Press Gazette.
Fox, under the rambunctious Ailes, has set the cat among the pigeons in American TV news, still dominated by the three main networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, and their longtime anchors, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. On one hand, it has injected a new degree of opinionated forthrightness - and an undeniable energy - into a normally staid world. On the other hand, in an effort to put CNN and third-place MSNBC on the defensive, it continues to trumpet the absurd claim that it has no political slant at all, thus implicitly defining its rivals as biased to the left.
Ailes's defence of his communications with the president, in that respect, was more of the same: a bizarre insistence that there was nothing remotely partisan about his actions. "I wrote a personal note to a White House staff member as a concerned American citizen expressing my outrage about the attacks on our country," he said in a terse statement. "I did not give up my American citizenship to take this job." He was acting only "as a human being and as a citizen," he later explained. Speaking to the Washington Post on Monday, he exploded: "Woodward got it all screwed up, as usual. The reason he's not as rich as Tom Clancy is that while he and Clancy both make stuff up, Clancy does his research first."
Woodward, disinterring a pungent phrase from his Watergate days, called Ailes's responses "a classic non-denial denial. Why would Rove take Ailes's personal message to the president? Just to say that Roger Ailes is expressing his outrage? Obviously, if it was significant enough for Rove to carry it to the Oval Office, it had some recommendations for policy. Why else is Roger being so furtive about it?" (By the end of the day, the two had apparently made up. "I feel terrible now that I trashed him,"Ailes said of Woodward. On Thursday, at a Fox Entertainment Group AGM, Murdoch called Ailes's note to the president "patriotic", and said he was sure Ailes would have done the same even if there had been a Democrat in the White House.)
There is a commercial strategy behind Fox's insistence on its objectivity - but there also seems to be an element of Ailes's personal psychodrama in his response to the Woodward charge. A former adviser to Nixon, Reagan and the current president's father, Ailes is profoundly irritated by accusations of enduring sympathies for the Republicans, and once reportedly urged a newspaper interviewer not to dwell on his earlier career because it was "irrelevant". He does not, for example, take kindly to implications of bias on Election Night 2000, when Fox hired John Ellis, who happens to be the president's cousin, to analyse the returns. (Fox was the first channel to declare a Bush victory that night.)
"If I had committed murder, people would have let me off the hook by now," he said of his earlier career in a New York Times interview. The aura of objectivity, it seems, is just as important to Ailes as to the critics who accuse his channel of having undermined it.
But "objectivity does not mean, nor has it ever meant, that you don't have opinions," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project for excellence in journalism, affiliated to Columbia University. "It doesn't mean that you are without personal bias, and it doesn't mean neutrality. It means that the journalist's working method is objective - that you're independent, disinterested, and you're not going to let your interests determine the outcome of your journalism. The notion that objectivity is a myth because everybody has opinions, therefore it's OK for me to secretly advise politicians, because I'm a human being after all - that's a misunderstanding of the concept."
At the very least, Rosenstiel says, "they should have said in their coverage of Bush's speeches [after September 11] that the chairman of this network has consulted with the president. The reason they didn't is because if people knew they would trust Fox less. That's the reason why Roger Ailes is mad about this now."
