Is Fox News
Biased?
From the Center for American Progress
Fox News claims to be fair and balanced, but a recent 25-week study by the nonpartisan Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found a serious conservative bias in Brit Hume’s Special Report program on Fox. FAIR found “57 percent of Special Report’s one-on-one guests were ideological conservatives, 12 percent were centrists and 11 percent were progressives.” Additionally, Special Report “rarely features women or non-white guests in these prominent newsmaker interview spots.”
Also recently at least one conservative admitted that Fox News has a bias. Rich Noyes, of the right-wing Media Research Center, acknowledged Fox’s “commentary tends to move toward the right.”
And Bush administration policy is rarely, if ever, questioned on Fox. According to the conservative Washington Times, when downplaying Fox News memos instructing reporters not to dwell on Iraq casualties, Fox’s top news executive John Moody claimed “casualties are part of war” in Iraq and “should not be described as relevant to the political question … ‘should we be there?’” With more than 900 American soldiers killed in Iraq, polls show increasing casualties are causing more Americans to question Bush administration policy—a question apparently not allowed on Fox News. Thirty-three separate memos from Fox News director John Moody have recently been published, showing just how far the network’s executives have gone to skew news coverage. When the White House called for more positive news coverage of Iraq, Moody’s memos instructed Fox correspondents to downplay US casualties and violence plaguing Iraq. In a 3/24/04 memo, Moody complained, “the real news in Iraq is being obscured by temporary tragedy.” A few weeks later, he instructed reporters to “not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of US lives.”
Moody’s memo on 6/2/03 highlighted FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s interview on Fox after the FCC’s decision to follow Rupert Murdoch’s demand to loosen ownership rules. Moody said, “let’s do a few hits on the commission’s vote.” That translated into Murdoch-style propaganda, with a Fox News anchor that day disparaging the previous rules preventing media consolidation as “written back when we had black and white TV, rabbit-ear antennas and three channels to choose from—obviously, the media world is very different today.” While Powell’s decision was the most radical rollback of media law in a generation, the Fox News anchor claimed, “In fact, this wasn’t really a major overhaul. You simply loosened the rules a bit.”
Fox News has also been a major media force in parroting various unsubstantiated claims to buttress the Bush White House. On tax cuts, for instance, Fox News anchor Brian Wilson claimed on 3/5/04 that Americans were “seeing the benefits of [the Bush] tax cuts that’s in the system,” even though Fox News had done a poll a few months earlier which showed 61 percent of Americans believed the tax cuts had not helped them.
At a time when Fox’s own polls showed 69 percent of Americans thought the economy under Bush was either “fair” or “poor” and an NBC poll showed 62 percent of Americans believed the Bush tax cuts did nothing or hurt the economy, Fox correspondent Carl Cameron said on 1/18/02 that “polls show that the public prefers the Republican economic approach over that of Democrats.” And despite burgeoning violence in Iraq, Fox News Sunday host Tony Snow claimed Bush’s Iraq policy “has created peaceful conditions in more than 90 percent of Iraq”—a fact he offered no documentation to support.
Fox News viciously attacked former Bush counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke after he delivered a devastating account of how the White House botched the response to 9/11. And Moody’s 3/24/04 memo shows just how dismissive of journalistic ethics the network became in its quest to destroy Clarke. In that memo, Moody justifies Fox’s airing of an anonymous briefing Clarke gave on background during his tenure at the White House. When Clarke gave the briefing, journalists agreed not to use his name, as he was speaking generally for the White House, not giving his own opinion. But instead of respecting that agreement, Fox decided to follow the White House’s smear campaign and became the first network to air the briefing, breaking a long-standing journalistic tradition of not exposing sources correspondents agreed to leave unattributed. The network then claimed Clarke’s two-year-old statements called into question his new criticisms, even though he was no longer working for the White House and was now free to air his opinions. As Moody bragged, “Neither [Fox correspondent Jim Angle] nor Fox did anything wrong, except accomplish some good reporting.”
Fox Distorts, Fox Connives
Using interviews with former Fox employees and other inside material to detail manipulation of news stories and directives to promote Republicans and belittle Democrats, Robert Greenwald’s new documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. The film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know. Outfoxed also explores Murdoch’s burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person. Media experts, including Walter Cronkite, Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society.
Outfoxed reveals the secrets of former Fox news producers, reporters, bookers and writers who expose what it’s like to work for Fox News. These former Fox employees talk about how they were forced to push a “right-wing” point of view or risk their jobs. Some have even chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect their current livelihoods. As one employee said “There’s no sense of integrity as far as having a line that can’t be crossed.”
Don Hazen, of
AlterNet, recently said “Outfoxed demonstrates in painful detail how
one media empire, making full use of the public airwaves, can reject any semblance
of fairness or perspective, and serve as the mouthpiece of right-wing conservatives,
fully relishing its role.”
And Neal Gabler, a Fox News Channel contributor, said last July “To say
that this network promotes the Republican view, not the conservative view,
but the Republican view is like saying that the pope is Catholic. It’s
self-evident.”
Just days after its release, Outfoxed was selling like hotcakes, bouncing between the #1 and #2 most popular DVDs on Amazon.com. Not surprisingly, that brought on a blaze of attacks from Fox News, whose credibility as a news organization has been severely damaged. In a diatribe that only reinforces Fox’s unethical mix of conservative commentary and “news,” Fox anchor/commentator John Gibson called one of the movie’s sponsors, MoveOn.org, a “liberal hatchet organization” and claimed “America’s major media are dominated by the left—80-some percent of reporters are self-described liberals.” That, of course, is untrue—a report released on May 23 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that only 34% of national journalists identified themselves as liberal, and 61% identified themselves as moderate or conservative. Despite this onslaught, however, more evidence emerged last July of Fox’s true bias. Georgetown law professor David Cole recounted first-hand in The Nation how Fox’s Bill O’Reilly deliberately misled his viewers about Iraq:
“I sat in the Washington studio as the taping of the show began in New York with a rant from Bill O’Reilly. He claimed that the Factor had established the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and then played a clip from Thomas Kean, head of the Senate’s 9/11 Commission, in which Kean said, ‘There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States, in other words, on 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Saddam … and Al Qaeda.’
“I was impressed. O’Reilly, who had announced his show as the ‘No Spin Zone,’ was actually playing a balanced sound bite, one that accurately reported the commission’s findings both that there was no evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and that there was some evidence of contacts (if no “collaborative relationship”) between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Maybe all those nasty things Al Franken had said about O’Reilly weren’t true after all.
“But suddenly O’Reilly interrupted, plainly angry, and said, ‘We can’t use that … We need to redo the whole thing.’ Three minutes of silence later, the show began again, with O’Reilly re-recording the introduction verbatim. Except this time, when he got to the part about Kean, he played no tape, and simply paraphrased Kean as confirming that ‘definitely there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.’ The part about no link to 9/11 was left on the cutting-room floor.”
Cablenewser, a respected cable industry trade publication, published an anonymous e-mail from a senior Fox News official in which the official admits that challenging Republicans and conservatives “is not the Fox way.” Instead, the official says, the mantra is “Let the GOP off easy, and pound the Democrat du jour.” The official, who according to the trade publication “has been with the network since it premiered,” says that “to suggest that the on-air talent and producers are free to report the news as they see fit is disingenuous at best”—a point corroborated by former Fox employees interviewed in Outfoxed.
While Fox News desperately tries to defend its credibility, some of its own right-wing allies are corroborating the premise of Outfoxed. Insight Magazine, the far-right publication of the Washington Times, admitted Fox’s news bias, noting themselves that the network is a “conservative news network that claims to be fair and balanced.”
Who Is Rupert Murdoch?
As Outfoxed continues its feverish sales across the country, it is raising the most fundamental questions about media, ownership, and political influence. As former New York Times editorial board member Geneva Overholser notes, “Outfoxed has blown this subject wide open”—and at the center of it all is Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Over the last decade, Murdoch has used the US government’s increasingly lax media regulations to consolidate his hold over the media and wider political debate in America. Consider his empire: According to BusinessWeek, “his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents … He publishes 175 newspapers … in the US, he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country … In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered.”
Murdoch has made no bones about his strong support for President Bush. He told Newsweek before the Iraq invasion that “one senses [Bush] is a man of great character and deep humility.” He said Bush “will either go down in history as a very great president or he’ll crash and burn. I’m optimistic it will be the former by a ratio of 2 to 1.” Murdoch has done everything he can to make that prediction a reality: As one former News Corp. official told Fortune, “part of our political strategy [in the US] was the New York Post and the creation of Fox News and the Weekly Standard.” And as Slate reports, Murdoch put that empire to work for Bush. In 2000, Murdoch placed “George W. Bush cousin John Ellis in charge of [Fox’s] Election Night vote-counting operation in 2000.” And “Ellis made Fox the first network to declare Bush the victor,” even as the New Yorker reported that Ellis spent the evening discussing the election with George W. and Jeb Bush. Most recently, Murdoch’s partisan support for the Bush White House appeared when he took the extraordinary step of putting an editorial on the front page of his New York Post calling the 9/11 Commission a “National Disgrace.” At the time, the Commission was in the process of revealing material showing how the Bush administration was not focused on counter-terrorism before 9/11.
Just after the Iraq invasion, the New York Times reported “The war has illuminated anew the exceptional power in the hands of Murdoch, 72, the chairman of News Corp … In the last several months, the editorial policies of almost all his English-language news organizations have hewn very closely to Murdoch’s own stridently hawkish political views, making his voice among the loudest in the Anglophone world in the international debate over the American-led war with Iraq.”
Murdoch’s neoconservative journal, the Weekly Standard, houses operatives like Bill Kristol who have been pushing for an Iraq war for years. Murdoch actually admitted that part of his motivation in supporting the war was cheap oil, saying, “The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” And before the invasion, the Guardian reported Murdoch gave “his full backing to war, praising George Bush as acting ‘morally’ and ‘correctly’ and describing Tony Blair as ‘full of guts’” for his support of the war.
While Murdoch describes himself as “a devout anti-Soviet and anti-communist,” Time Magazine reports he “became bewitched by China in the early ’90s.” In an effort to persuade Chinese dictators that he would never challenge their behavior, Murdoch threw the BBC off his Chinese satellite network after BBC aired reports about Chinese human rights violations. Murdoch argued BBC “was gratuitously attacking the regime [by] playing film of the massacre in Tiananmen Square over and over again.” When Murdoch found out his publishing company, HarperCollins, was going to publish a book critical of the Chinese government, the book contract was cancelled. According to the LA Times, Murdoch’s son James, head of News Corp.’s China operations, actually attacked religious groups in China who the Chinese government was repressing, and lambasted the Western press for its negative portrayal of China’s awful human rights record. And today, Murdoch employs a top TV consultant to help improve communist China’s state-run television.
Although Murdoch has denied having direct editorial influence over his media empire, in recent weeks this has been debunked. As the New York Tines reported, “When The New York Post tore up its front page … to trumpet an apparent exclusive that Representative Richard A. Gephardt would be Senator John Kerry’s running mate, the newspaper based its decision on a very high-ranking source: Rupert Murdoch, the man who controls the company.”
The BBC reported that “Murdoch’s die-hard loyalty to tax loopholes has drawn wide criticism” after a report found that in the four years prior to June 30, 1998, “Murdoch’s News Corporation and its subsidiaries paid only $325 million in corporate taxes worldwide. That translates as 6% of the $5.4 billion consolidated pre-tax profits for the same period … By comparison another multi-national media empire, Disney, paid 31%.” When a congressional panel in 2003 asked if he was hiding money in tax havens, including communist Cuba, Murdoch responded “we might have in the past, I’m not denying that.” The Washington Post reports that his company “reduces its annual tax bill by channeling profits through dozens of subsidiaries in low-tax or no-tax places such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.” And despite changing his citizenship to avoid US law prohibiting too much foreign ownership of media, Murdoch still officially lists many of his companies in Australia in order to avoid IRS scrutiny.
FromThe Progress Report, July 13 & 15, 2004, from the Center for American Progress, www.americanprogress.org. To find out more on the documentary Outfoxed visit www.outfoxed.org.
August/September
We
Need a Mass Movement of People Like You
Bill Moyers
Is
Fox News Biased?
The Center for American Progress
In
Praise of Unruly Women
Arianna Huffington
Returning
From War: A Family Affair
Shri Estes
Healing
Our World From the Inside Out
Carol Hwoschinsky
From
Hurt to Heart: Healing Conflict at its Roots
Eryn Kalish
Are
We In Danger Right Now?
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP
Our
Clean-Energy Birthright
Jeane Manning
The
Organic Foods Movement
Paul Cienfuegos
Genetically
Engineered Foods May Pose A Health Risk
Jeffrey M. Smith
Sacred
Menstruation
Julie Gauss, CCH
Shifting
Into a New Era of Peace and Harmony
John Darling
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Fox News Spins
9/11 Commission Report
The Bush administration’s long-running attempts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda were dealt a serious blow when the September 11 Commission’s June 16 interim report indicated that there did not appear to be a “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, and that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks.
But if you were watching Fox News, you saw something very different, as the conservative cable network eagerly defended the Bush administration and criticized the rest of the media for mishandling the story.
On Fox’s
Special Report newscast (6/16/04), anchor Brit Hume charged that the media
were mischaracterizing the report: “The Associated Press leads off its
story on a new 9/11 commission report by saying the document bluntly contradicts
the Bush administration by claiming to have no credible evidence linking Saddam
Hussein to the September 11 terrorist attacks.” Hume maintained that
the AP story was inaccurate: “In fact, the Bush administration has never
said that such evidence exists.”
In fact, it’s Hume that is misrepresenting the AP story—quoting
from the story’s lead, but then changing its meaning through an inaccurate
paraphrase. The story actually begins: “Bluntly contradicting the Bush
administration, the commission investigating the September 11 attacks reported
Wednesday there was ‘no credible evidence’ that Saddam Hussein had
ties with Al Qaeda.”
Hume changed the allegation, from Hussein having ties with Al Qaeda to his having ties to the September 11 attacks, in order to knock it down, claiming that the Bush administration never linked Iraq to September 11. But that is not accurate either: Bush’s letter to Congress formally announcing the commencement of hostilities against Iraq (3/18/03) explained that the use of force would be directed against “terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” In his “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Lincoln (5/1/03), Bush declared that the invasion of Iraq had “removed an ally of Al Qaeda.”
And during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press (9/14/03), when Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he was “surprised” that so many Americans connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, Cheney responded:
“No. I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection … You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn’t have any evidence of that. We’ve learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW [biological weapons and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization.”
Clearly, Cheney was describing exactly the sort of “collaborative relationship” that the September 11 commission now says that Iraq did not have with Al Qaeda, and stating that this relationship makes it “not surprising” that people would connect Iraq with the September 11 attacks.
But Fox kept advancing the notion that the commission’s report actually backed up what the Bush administration has been saying. Hume explained that Bush has long denied a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, while maintaining that “There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties.” This is, according to Hume, “an assertion the commission’s report actually supports.”
The report indicates several meetings between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden, who was attempting to set up training camps in Iraq and procure weapons. The Iraqis apparently “did not respond” to those requests. This is a far cry from what most people would call a “tie” or a “connection.”
And Cheney and Bush have long argued that Iraq/Al Qaeda “connections” included weapons training and other “high-level contacts”; Bush has said directly (11/7/02) that Husssein “is a threat because he’s dealing with Al Qaeda.”
The commission’s report does not support those allegations. The report also indicated that the supposed meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague probably never happened. That meeting has been cited by Bush officials, most notably Cheney, as evidence connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda and specifically to the 9/11 plot.
Fox reported on the report’s implicit contradictions of administration claims as if they were an invention of the media. On Hume’s Special Report (6/16/04), the anchor got the ball rolling: “There were a lot of media reports today that said that major, new cold water had been tossed on the administration claims about Iraq and Al Qaeda. What about it?”
Pundit Jeff Birnbaum of the Washington Post answered: “Well, I don’t think that that’s true … The Bush administration did not claim that there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. That was not the claim. That was not the claim. What, in fact, the staff report indicates is that there was considerable interaction between bin Laden and Iraq. It may not have produced all that much, but it was clear that they’re fellow travelers.”
NPR correspondent Mara Liasson continued: “I agree with Jeff. I mean, the fact that the administration’s arguments for going against Iraq was not because it caused 9/11. Now, it’s true that a lot of Americans did conflate the two and did think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it.” (In fact, a poll found that Fox viewers were the most likely news consumers to believe this unsubstantiated claim—PIPA, 10/2/03.)
On June 17’s Special Report, guest anchor Jim Angle claimed, “The 9/11 commission staff concluded there was no collaboration between the two to attack the US. But critics suggested that meant no ties at all.” The commission actually said that there was no “collaborative relationship” at all, not just on the question of attacking the United States.
When the White House struck back at the media over its coverage of the report, some at Fox seemed enthusiastic. “The Bush administration strikes back against the deceptive media,” cheered Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, before playing a clip of Cheney appearing on CNBC (6/17/04) characterizing a New York Times headline as “outrageous.”
O’Reilly did not air another portion of Cheney’s interview in which he lied about a previous statement he had made. When host Gloria Borger mentioned that Cheney had previously described the meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence as “pretty well confirmed,” Cheney interrupted: “No, I never said that … Absoutely not.” But he had said just that, on NBC’s Meet the Press (12/9/01): ‘’That’s been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.’’
But for O’Reilly, it was other media that were deceptive: “Cheney has a right to be angry, and so does every American who wants a truthful media,” he explained. “Anti-Bush zealots are hurting the fight against terror by misleading Americans about what’s actually happening. That puts all of our lives in danger.”
It’s not surprising that the Bush administration would try to parse the meaning of words like “link” or “tie” in order to spin the commission report in its favor. But journalists should challenge official spin, not promote it.
From a June 22, 2004 report from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting Media analysis, critiques and activism, www.fair.org.
