Murdoch's Fox News (Page 3)

Still, Fox is obviously filling a niche. Since it started in 1996, ratings have soared, climbing more than 200 percent in the last quarter of 2000 from the same period the year before. During the fourth quarter of 2000 it started turning a profit, a year ahead of schedule. And in December, its ratings beat CNN in prime time, even though CNN reaches about 22 million more homes. So does Fox's success attest to a huge conservative audience out there? Not necessarily. Sure, there's the Limbaugh crowd, which wants to hear right-wing vitriol. But plenty of people tune in to be titillated by the news channel's brash, infotainment style. "People come up to me on the street and say, 'I hate that Sean Hannity,'" says University of Southern California law professor and frequent Fox contributor Susan Estrich, one of the news channel's few truly liberal regular commentators. "But I say, 'Do you hate him five days a week?' They say, 'Yes.' They watch it."

Murdoch has done something ingenious: He's created an entertaining news channel that disseminates his viewpoint far and wide and also makes good business sense. It costs far less to get two people to snipe at each other on the air than to pay reporters and producers to dig up real news. And although Fox may be leading the transformation to econo-news, it is not alone. The pressure to attend to the bottom line is yielding a watered-down form of journalism at all TV news outlets. "My views of contemporary journalism are so disheartening at the moment that I find it very difficult to point just to Fox and say, 'Tsk, tsk, look what they're doing,' without pointing at the same time to all of the networks and saying, 'Tsk, tsk, what have you done?'" says Marvin Kalb, Washington-office director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former broadcast journalist for CBS and NBC.

Murdoch may be the most blatant, though, about putting profits above principles. In the mid-1990s he eliminated the BBC from his Hong Kong-based Star Satellite news service because the Chinese government didn't like the channel's critical programming. And his publishing house, HarperCollins, dropped former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten's East and West, which included less than flattering descriptions of Chinese leaders. At a Fox-owned station in Florida, award-winning reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson claim their contract was canceled in 1997 because they refused to soft-pedal their investigative story about the effect of bovine growth hormone on the state's milk supply after BGH producer Monsanto complained directly to Roger Ailes. They sued. Wilson couldn't prove his case, but Akre won hers, which charged that Fox fired her for threatening to blow the whistle on its action.

But every network has its closetful of stories killed, buried or neutralized to serve the owners' or advertisers' interest. A study last year by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press and Columbia Journalism Review found that more than 40 percent of nearly 300 journalists surveyed said they had intentionally avoided newsworthy stories or softened the tone of stories to benefit the interests of their news organizations. That fear of offense radically restricts the range of opinion that makes it onto the news networks, redefining the center and relegating left speakers to the fringe, seemingly out of touch with their audience.

So what to do? Media critic McChesney proposes stepping up FCC regulations, boosting funding for public radio and television, and revamping the antitrust laws to set limits on media ownership. Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC and PBS, advocates making broadcast companies pay to use the public airwaves and using that money to fund public service programming and a stronger public broadcasting system. Realistically, however, given Bush's picks at the FCC and the Justice Department, additional fees and stricter antitrust scrutiny are unlikely to happen anytime soon. And it's hard to imagine this sharply divided Congress putting significantly more money into public broadcasting.

Can liberals compete? Yes and no. "I hope there's a revolt out there that wants to have ten liberal O'Reilly Factors," quips Fox contributor Estrich. "Where are these guys on the left who can do a news channel that covers the news well and also provides an opportunity to get their views across?"

These days, that's an enormously expensive proposition. When Murdoch entered the game, on top of capital and production costs he paid cable operators $10 per household to carry the Fox News Channel. "That escalated the cost of starting a channel to $500 million," estimates Jay Levin, founder and former owner of the alternative LA Weekly, who tried to launch an environmental cable channel in 1993 that was ultimately unsuccessful. But there are alternatives. Digital television is finally becoming a reality and should vastly increase the number of channels, at least temporarily reducing startup costs. And the newest broadband technology creates an opportunity for an endless number of televisionlike stations via the Internet.

Fox started in 1996, when anti-Clinton sentiment burned bright. The new Bush Administration offers ample targets for left-wing fire. And there's a market for it, insists John Schwartz, president of Free Speech TV, a nonprofit station based in Boulder, Colorado, that's carried on the satellite Dish Network and reaches 5 million homes. "There's a fanatical viewership," says Schwartz.

Of course, without a media magnate like Murdoch behind it, an independent station's reach will never rival Fox's. But done with intelligence and wit, left TV could at least be a potent thorn in its side. For now, though, Murdoch and Fox remain unchallenged.

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