House of Eratosthenes

You know what that means: We’re going to debate, and re-debate, whether Fox News is biased or not. I like this. Every now and then, you’ll see some evidence that the people in America we call “liberals” don’t know, or don’t care about, the difference between a fact and an opinion. Usually you have to wait a few weeks to see an example of this, but when we start debating whether Fox News is biased or not, the examples come flying at us like service-for-twelve silverware at a junkyard magnet.

Fox News may actually be biased to the right. But there are few things in life sadder than a left-winger, smiling smugly, thinking he’s just proven the case.

Sometime in early 2004, Neal Boortz issued a challenge to his readers and listeners (fifth story down): Prove the conservative bias of Fox News Channel. It’s two years later. I don’t know the status of this challenge. I do know that some six months onward, it was still unanswered, which I find really surprising. I mean, for as many times a year as we hear it — sometimes several times a day — you’d think the bias of Fox News would be an incredibly easy thing to prove. It can’t be all smoke and no fire, can it?

Well, here is something you may be seeing soon. It’s a tattle-tale piece from Charlie Reina, who says he served six years as the producer of News Watch. Gee, maybe someone needs to simply load up this article and send it on to Neal in answer to his challenge, right? Let’s see what Reina has to say:

Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox – including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America – did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn’t warning me to “be careful” how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan (“You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him.”), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean (“You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don’t get the last word.”)

Sounds pretty bad, right? Hmm, I don’t know. What happens right before a boss tells his subordinate to be careful about something? Maybe…the subordinate shows the boss what the subordinate has a need to be warned about?

Isn’t that an actual term in the land of bosses and subordinates? A “warning”? Something that’s done after the subordinate screws up, that stops short of actually doing anything about the screw-up? Kind of a don’t-let-it-happen-again kind of a thing?

Sure, that could be evidence of Roger Ailes’ political bias. That’s pretty likely. It’s even more likely, it’s evidence of Charlie Reina’s political bias in the opposite direction. “Make sure the pro-environmentalists don’t get the last word” does sound incriminating, but I think most reasonable people would say they’d want to know who Reina gave the last word last time he had a similar assignment.

Being left without that, I want to see if Reina has something further. And he does.

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it’s a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, “Roger’s Revenge” – against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Now, I find this really stunning. I live in California, where we just got through with watching union muscle shove The Terminator around in that special-referendum election last year. For those who weren’t following, the final tally was Unions 8, Terminator 0. The unions spent their hundreds of millions of dollars, and not one of the special initiatives passed. Not one.

So it strikes me as incredibly bizarre, that a staff of journalists can lose their objectivity by their not answering to a union. How anyone can say that, is beyond me. Don’t unionized forces labor under “undue motivation to please the big [union] boss”? But Reina has more:

in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance’s “Under God” wording unconstitutional, FNC’s newsroom chief ordered the judge’s mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get “as much information as possible” about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling’s transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge’s physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

Well, this is turning rapidly into something that cannot be submitted in response to Boortz’ challenge after all. Two incredibly incriminating pieces of evidence of the bias of Fox News; neither one of them managed to make it to air. You have to take the word of someone who worked there, that they happened.

Hey, that is still something. The ridiculous implication about needing a union in order to sustain objectivity creates a few problems, but there’s no reason here to think he’s an out-and-out liar. So fine, I’ll take him at his word. Fox News has a toady who is not only eager to please his bosses, but so incompetent that he’s oh-for-two in getting his incredibly right-wing slant out there. Something keeps going wrong.

I just expect something better. Something…that actually makes it on air. That is not forthcoming here. We do have the tale of The Memo, though.

…the roots of FNC’s day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel’s daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it.

The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration’s point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. But along with the obvious – information on who is where and what they’ll be covering – there have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors’ copy. For instance, from the March 20th memo: “There is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan’s remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are ‘with the Iraqi people.’ One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought.” Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only “food for thought,” but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General’s remarks as “utterly incomprehensible”?

The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox’s newsroom personnel into action – or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be “whining” about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent’s report on the day’s fighting – simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.

Once again: It seems pretty bad, but when you think about it there’s nothing really compelling about it. A correspondent’s report got killed by a producer. How do we really know that the reason was, it included a shot of children in a hospital? Isn’t it the job of producers to kill reports, if the reports can’t be crammed into the space allocated for them? Reina could have said out loud, in advance “I’ll bet this segment doesn’t make it because there’s a shot of children in a hospital” and “I told you so” after the segment was cut — this doesn’t offer even the tiniest substantiation to the idea that the hospital shot was what killed the report. Sure it is, in Reina’s mind. But that doesn’t make it so. And that, kids, is one of the differences between a fact and an opinion. If Reina doesn’t understand this difference, small wonder that things look incriminating to him, when they actually aren’t.

A control for the experiment would be useful. What exactly gets a report cut from a CNN broadcast? Or from a news program on MSNBC? What kinds of memos do they have over there?

Well, there is another way to answer Neal Boortz’ challenge: You can take the classic liberal approach and simply scream that it isn’t fair. One of the things Neal said was “those panel discussions at the end of the show don’t count. There are liberals, moderates and conservatives on those panels. That’s not news, that’s opinion. Just find me the instances of bias in the actual reporting of the news.”

It would be highly uncharacteristic of the liberal community to let a private citizen like Neal Boortz go running around, willy-nilly, laying down challenges in whatever manner he likes without supervision or control — or at the very least, whining. So one year ago, the “PO’d Liberal” answered Neal’s challenge, liberal-style.

[Boortz’ challenge] comes with a caveat. Let’s look at his words: “Just find me the instances of bias in the actual reporting of the news.” He talks about this in several entries on his website, and he makes it very clear that in looking for a bias, you are to stay clear of the commentary such as Hannity or O’Reilly. Excuse me? He’s telling us to ignore the fact that Bill O’Reilly carries an enormous amount of weight at the company, and that Hannity is one of that most right-wing people on TV, and that the channel is owned by the extremely conservative Rupert Murdoch, and that the channel is run by Roger Ailes, a man who has been active in the GOP for decades, helping elect Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, brought in because of his mastery at attack politics? Noooooo, we can’t look at them. We’re supposed to look strictly at the news portion of the channel.
:
Boortz is the one who issued the challenge, but told us to stay clear of the TV op-eds. But Boortz is constantly harping about the media being biased to the left. What is his proof? If you listen to him regularly or read his site regularly, you will quickly see a common theme: He likes to point out what the mainstream media failed to report on. Oh give me a break. First, almost every time he does that, if you go to Yahoo you’ll see the headlines right there on the right, straight from the Associated Press or Reuters or any of the big names. Second, as a guy who has a law degree and was once a successful lawyer, I find it amazing that he would try to prove a case by stating what somebody didn’t say.

So yes, the facts are in: Fox News is biased to the right, big time.

Okay then, taking both Boortz and the PO’d Liberal at their words, I guess it would have to come down to this. I can find evidence that Fox News is tilted toward the right, but only if you let me look into the opinions/editorials, otherwise, I can’t. Right? Is that it? I mean, it doesn’t look like they disagree on this. Neal says op-eds don’t count, the PO’d Liberal says they do; and, appearances being any indication, their dispute about whether Fox News is biased or not, stems from this. Mr. PO’d has lots of opportunity to say “I don’t need to go searching in the opinions/editorials, I can find it right in the news!” Does he do this? No.

This is a great example of liberal thinking. I find it amazing that Neal Boortz would try to prove a case by stating what somebody didn’t say. So yes, the facts are in: Fox News is biased to the right, big time. What facts are those, Mr. PO? You poke holes in the logic Boortz uses…maybe you even make a great point about Neal Boortz being biased, or even, as a result of that bias, being blatantly unfair — applying a different criteria for liberal bias than what he allows for conservative bias. From that, we determine that Fox News is indeed biased? How? I’m missing something. What is it?

Maybe my expectations are too high. I’m still back at Square One, expecting what any reasonable person would expect on hearing Boortz’ challenge: I expect someone to step up and say “On such and such a date and such and such a time on such and such a program, Brit Hume read the news and he said xxxxx…and that’s biased.” Granted, that last tidbit would be a matter of opinion. But I’m waiting for the sequence of events to be presented to me — something that actually made it on the air — for me to form that opinion. Give me some meat. Persuade me, when I’m not initially inclined to buy whatever poo-poo sandwich you might happen to be selling any given day. That’s called “convincing people,” something liberals have become atrophied from doing.

Why is it that apparently, nothing can be offered that even roughly fits the template, above? It really doesn’t seem like much to ask.

I can’t ask this directly to the PO’d liberal. The text under his masthead says: “Reader comments are not allowed. If you don’t like that, get your own stinking blog.”

Well, I see it’s very important that people get permission from Mr. “PO’d” before they do things like that. So I’m glad I got it.

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Wednesday, April 26th, 2006