Fox News: Fairly Unbalanced

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Fox News: Fairly Unbalanced
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

April 2, 2003

"Leaning Left"

James Hall Like many people, I've been switching around channels and examining different coverages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. There's a lot of excellent coverage out there from broadcast news to cable news to print journalism of all ideological stripes. But one cable network stands out for its pro-Bush position, patriotic commercialism, and cheesy self-promotion: Fox News. They've reported and I've decided: Fox News is anything but fair and balanced.

It's not so much the complete lack of faces from one side of the political spectrum. (You guess which one.) It's not the snide treatment of the US antiwar protesters and the complete lack of coverage of the huge and growing anti-war movement abroad. (If you watch Fox, you come away with the idea that there are just a few unreasonable and cowardly French and Germans arrayed against us.) It's not even the smarmy commercialism directing interviewed soldiers to chant "We love Fox News!" or having Oliver North declare, "Every Marine out here watches Fox News," as though this were Sweeps Week and not the middle of a war.

It came to a head for me when I saw a piece on Fox that was critical of the Al-jazeera Network because it told its news stories from a "pro-Arab, pro-Saddam perspective." Well, Al-jazeera is an Arab network after all, and in case you haven't been watching the news of the rest of the world, Arabs outside of Kuwait are pretty upset with the war against Iraq. Not because they love Saddam so much, but because many Arabs doubt America's motives for being there and are afraid for the future of the Iraqi people.

The Fox News piece was bizarre because Fox itself is the closest thing to an American Al-jazeera there is in the Western press. Certainly it's the most patriotic, pro-American, pro-Bush network ever owned by a foreigner, Australian entertainment mogul Rupert Murdoch, who also happens to own the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, an influential journal that's been calling for a war with Iraq since 1998.

A Fox News marketing slogan repeatedly claims that their coverage is "fair and balanced." But if you have to remind everyone constantly that you're fair and balanced, then perhaps it's not so true. "Fair and balanced" news coverage tends to sell itself, all by itself.

"We report, you decide," is another Fox mantra. But does Fox report the news as much as it editorializes on it, putting a Bush administration spin on it? When journalists questioned the Rumsfeld war strategy and suggested that hardening Iraqi resistance had caused the US forces to "pause," Fox echoed the Bush administration criticism of media skepticism, repeating the official Defense Department position that US forces were both "on a timetable," and "would get there when they get there."

In the eyes of many these two statements might seem to contradict each other, but not on Fox, where the journalists constantly refer to the US war effort with the pronoun "we," and to "our soldiers," or "our US-led coalition forces" rather than an objective "American forces." Fox reporters on the field frequently gush in their praise of the slightest, normal military efforts, as when Geraldo Rivera warmly congratulated an American brigadier general in charge of logistics for doing "a marvelous job of moving supplies." "We're just doing our jobs," replied the embarrassed officer. "It's not a big deal."

Geraldo's now under a cloud for being just a bit too enthused about drawing future US troop movements on the sand for his viewers.

Now Fox isn't the only network making ratings hay by beating the drums of patriotism. Viewers on ABC were probably stunned to witness Diane Sawyer leading soldiers in Kuwait in "God Bless America." But Fox eagerly adopted the Bush administration's positions and even its terminology, becoming the only network to join the administration efforts to characterize suicide bombers as "homicide bombers" and re-characterizing the Saddam Fedayeen from "paramilitaries" to "death squads" shortly after Donald Rumsfeld and Ari Fleischer began to use that term.

Fox's problem is not with its overt patriotism, but with its lack of that professed balance. News networks report the news; they don't promote the political points of view of their governments as news. There are clear and sensible barriers between the news reporting arms of most media organizations, print and television alike, and their editorial arms. But within Fox, that distinction hardly exists. And the close connections of Fox News with the Bush administration, from Fox News President Roger Ailes to its Republican anchors and media personalities like Shawn Hannity, Tony Snow, and Bill O'Reilly, makes the Fox the all-but-official voice of the government.

Fox's links to the Bush administration are unmistakable. Fox News President Roger Ailes was President George H. W. Bush's chief media consultant, the architect of his nasty Willie Horton campaign. Instead of choosing professional news journalists for his anchors, Ailes has chosen anchors like WSJ editorialist David Asman and conservative columnist and former Bush speechwriter Tony Snow, who is anchor of Fox News Sunday. A recent analysis of Fox News guests by the press watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) showed an 8 to 1 ratio between Republican and Democratic political guests on Fox News political shows.

In August of 2001, FAIR published an article calling Fox "The Most Biased Name in News," that traced Fox's close relationship to the Republican Party. The article detailed the Republican insider status of many of Fox media personalities including Hannity, Snow, and O'Reilly. Fox Managing Editor Brit Hume is a well-known conservative, as was former Fox anchor Catherine Crier, a Republican judge from Texas. Fred Barnes, Executive Editor at the Weekly Standard, is a frequent commentator on the network.

In an article entitled, "Is Fox News Fair?" The Columbia Journalism Review noted that Fox's hard news broadcasts are usually just a few minutes around the top and bottom of the hour, followed by longer stints of political talk-television, debate, and political interviews coming mostly from the right side of the spectrum. The CRJ characterized Fox News' actual news coverage as "small for an all-news cable channel…."

So is Fox really doing anything wrong by taking a conservative position on all issues? No. America is entitled to a right wing television network, just as it is entitled to right wing political magazines like The Weekly Standard and National Review. But these magazines don't claim to be "fair and balanced." They're proud advocates for their positions, unashamed to be called conservative, and Fox News ought to be just as proud and not hide behind a slogan it doesn't merit. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files