Fox News at 10: Nobody does it better. But they could.
So here's the verdict on 10 years of the Fox News Channel. It passed up a complacent CNN and never looked back. It's the go-to channel when news is breaking. It is has a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde personality: great when you want news, otherwise hideously unwatchable. No one should try to beat it at its own game. That doesn't mean, however, there isn't room for another 24-hour video news network.
Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune sagely observed this week that, for a channel that claims not to have any opinions of its own, Fox News sure seems to engender opinions in everyone else.
Just recently, there was President Clinton, wagging his finger in the face of Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” accusing him and, by extension, Fox News Channel of doing a “nice little conservative hit job” on his handling of the al-Qaeda threat. Over at the NewsHounds.us web site (motto: “We watch Fox so you don't have to”), the words “news,” “fair” and “balanced” are routinely put between mocking quote marks.
And then there are the fans. These are the people who find the MSM biased and unfriendly to their view of the world. They have made stars out of the on-air talent who took their side: Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin to name just a few. They took Fox News from insignificance -- in the fall of 1996, CNN was only worried about MSNBC -- to dominance and even influence, at least among Republicans.
As someone who cut his teeth on conservative media in college, then came to work for the MSM, I can see how both sides have a point.
I remember taking phone calls from readers in the months after Fox News Channel launched, asking me why their local cable company wasn't carrying it. I told them new channels take time to grow. That wasn't good enough for them. Fox News, they informed me, “wasn't biased like CNN.” How did they know so much about a channel they didn't get?
Give an assist to talk radio, which had built an appetite for contrarian views on the news. In the early 1990s, an NBC executive named Roger Ailes was ready to satisfy that hunger. Ailes, a former Republican operative with a knack for picking out on-air talent, had brought Chris Matthews and Geraldo Rivera to CNBC in the early 1990s. Now he wanted a second channel, called America's Talking, that fed into Rush Limbaugh's audience and challenged the complacency of CNN, cable's only 24-hour news source at the time. “They were biased, they were boring, (and) they looked like a network that has never had any competition,” Ailes said recently. But NBC went in a different direction, America's Talking became MSNBC, Ailes jumped to Fox and the rest is history.
“Slumping Fox News Celebrating 1st Decade,” was how the Associated Press headlined its story. Yes, ratings are down this year for the first time at Fox News Channel. And yes, some competitors have begun to sneak up. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann actually crowed on his “Countdown” broadcast this week that he had beaten “The O'Reilly Factor” for a full 15 minutes in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic. It was a brazen bit of chest-thumping that made little sense unless the viewer happened to know about Olbermann's ongoing (and remarkably effective) efforts to get under his rival's thin skin.
Mostly, though, Fox laps the other news channels. It averages nearly twice CNN's audience, 900,000 viewers to 549,000. (Ratings are down year-to-year at CNN and MSNBC, too.) And they don't have the devoted following that Fox has. It's like HGTV, Lifetime and ESPN in that it targets a niche audience and gives it lots of what it craves. From the “Fox and Friends” morning show, which was noted for its shameless cheerleading during the opening weeks of the Iraq war, to the nightly trouncings of moderate mushmouth Alan Colmes on “Hannity and Colmes,” Fox gives red meat to red staters all day long. It's more than a news channel; it's a lifestyle channel. No wonder Nielsen data shows that Fox viewers are tuned in much longer than CNN or MSNBC viewers.
Not widely known is that Fox built such loyalty on a fraction of CNN's budget. Ailes is now demanding that cable operators pay him CNN rates for Fox News Channel. If they pay up, and they almost certainly will, Fox will beef up its resources and expand its reach. A business channel is planned for 2007.
It's a canard that a daily diet of Fox News makes you dumb. A much-publicized Pew study two years ago found the Fox faithful were far more likely than, say, NPR listeners to believe in a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. But all that tells me is that the GOP faithful watch Fox News.
In sampling TV coverage this week of domestic and foreign news, I found little variance in the menu offered by Fox and other networks. Fox's deep sourcing within the GOP seemed to give it an edge in reporting on the aftermath of Rep. Mark Foley's resignation, and it was from Fox that I learned the troubling news that 21 U.S. military personnel had died in just four days in Iraq.
That's Fox News: Fox Spin is another matter. On Cavuto's show, conservative Bill Kristol was allowed to yap for 10 minutes without contradiction from the anchor. NewsHounds noted that “Hannity and Colmes” all but ignored Bob Woodward's new book. But by and large, what “60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt once said of CBS, NBC and ABC you could now say of Fox, MSNBC and CNN: Pick any of the three, watch it for a year, and you'll be as well-informed as someone who picked a different channel.
There are two hours of the day on Fox that are relatively spin-free, and no, O'Reilly's show isn't one of them. In the Midwest, it's the window from 5 to 7 p.m. The first hour is the politically chewy “Special Report with Brit Hume,” arguably the best mixture of reporting and punditry from inside the Beltway on TV today. Hume, when he was at ABC, wrote pieces for the right-wing American Spectator complaining about bias in his own profession. But on the air he is a fair dealer (though Beltway shows tend to favor political insiders and conventional wisdom). The second hour, hosted by Shepard Smith, is a pundit-free adrenaline rush through the day's news in the design of local newscasts, with stories great and trivial side by side and a segment called, “Around the World in 80 Seconds.”
Could someone beat Fox News at their own game? No. Could another channel come along in the next 10 years that takes a different approach to news, serves a different niche, and challenge Fox for supremacy in cable news? I suppose. But my feeling is, if it will happen anywhere, it will happen right here, on the Web. Getting your channel onto 80 million cable customers' lineups is hard, and expensive (just ask Rupert Murdoch; he bribed some operators to carry Fox News 10 years ago). But getting it out to your base via the Internet? Heck, folks are doing that already.
This is how YouTube is a game-changer. Now we all watch video on the web. That means we could be only a year or two away from an all-video live news network emerging on the web. It might serve a progressive audience, or people addicted to global news, or some other niche in enough numbers to attract sponsors. Stay tuned.
Earlier related stories:
Roger Ailes: Now we're the chicken-noodle network
Roger and me; or, Please don't feed the hyenas
