"Fox's finest hour"

Link: Paul Harris Online: Aaron Barnhart, TV Barn Radio.

In today's TV Barn Radio segment of my KMOX show, Aaron Barnhart and I talked further about the TV coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with special kudos to Fox's Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera for not being afraid to allow emotion to enter into their coverage of this story.

Comments

[Norman Hinton]

I must admit that I cannot tell CNN from FOX, but whichever is the one with all the distracting stuff running at the bottom and around the edges -- I don't even watch it in a doctor's waiting room where there is nothing else to do but read year-old copies of People and Sports Ilustrated.

(As for O'Reilly et al -- I cannot understand why anyone wants to watch people yell at each other.)

[Matt Savino]

I admit, I didn't see Fox last Thursday or Friday. (I did catch the wonderful Olbermann shows).

However, watching them today makes me wish I had. Because what's happening on there today is story after story of pro-Bush spin, with every reporter from Bill Hemmer to Shep to O'Reilly eagerly going "on message" that it was a state/local failure and the feds did nothing wrong.

[patrick]

I listened to your interview with Paul Harris and found your comments about Geraldo compelling. Then, alas, I came across this story at Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/05/cityinruins/

[Geraldo Rivera arrives in a Fox News truck. An elderly woman with blond hair grips his elbow. She's wearing thick dark glasses and a pink shirt. He carries her small white dog in his arms. He's wearing thigh-high waders unzipped to below his knees. We shake hands. "Her relative called one of our stations," Geraldo tells me, explaining how that call went to another station, and then another, and finally to him.

The woman had been stranded in her home for six days. Geraldo picked up the woman and her dog and brought them here. The woman looks frail on his arm, though not as bad perhaps as a lady collapsed on a chair nearby, unable to move. Or a woman in a wheelchair being lifted from the truck, carrying her prosthetic leg on her lap.

"That's the second time he brought her here," one of the doctors tells me, nodding toward Geraldo.

"What?"

"They did two takes. Geraldo made that poor woman walk from the Fox News van to the heliport twice. Both times carrying her dog."

"Are you serious?" I ask. He says he is.]

[Mark Jeffries]

They both do that--as does MSNBC, as do all of the morning shows, as does more and more of local news, as does even BBC World (the graphics are simply more tasteful-looking on the Beeb). The sports barization of TV news continues apace.

[Morgan R.]

How can you not tell Fox from CNN Norton? Turn on your TV today and it's obvious which is which. Fox keeps putting positive spin on the worst natural disaster in US history while CNN methodically reports the events as they are actually happening. CNN has the headline "State of Emergency" while Fox has the spin-tastic "America's Challange" along the bottom of the screen with American flags waving. "America's Challange" as in we're all americans and we should all rise above this and move on... We can't move on quickly enough for Bush and Co.

(I agree that Fox's about-face has been disturbingly, and predictably, swift. Shep Smith on Letterman ... in hindsight it was like he came back to the New York pod and was re-programmed. Still, that shouldn't take the shine off a great week of in-your-face on-the-scene reporting.--AB)