30
Oct
How Fox Stays “On Message”
MOGULS ON PARADE
REVEALED: THE FOX NEWS “BIBLE”
THE PENTAGON’S COMMISSARS
California may be on fire, Iraq in turmoil, Ariel Sharon under investigation, and President Bush speaking in tongues, but many of my fellow New Yorkers are obsessed by one thing and one thing only: what to wear for tomorrow’s round of Halloween parties and at the Big Parade. Last night, at a party for New York magazine media writer Michael Wolff (who in a few short years has gone from being an iconoclast to an icon), one of his impressive daughters confided she might go as media mogul. Imagine what it would look like if everyone went as the moguls they love to hate?
Her comment came as a small army of media types buzzed around in a restaurant called Michaels. It was an occasion to honor Michael and his new book “Autumn of the Moguls.” His book tears apart the “titans, poseurs and money guys who mastered and messed up big media. ” He explains how the pursuit of the bottom line bottomed out the integrity of the industry.
THE DEAL CULTURE
“Media was a financing game,” he writes. “Media was like real estate. One asset was meant to mortgage another. The more you mortgaged the more you could mortgage. The more deals you did, the more deals you could do. ” As I read those lines, while imbibing wine and shrimp, I looked up at former real estate manipulator Mort Zuckerman, who now owns the New York Daily News. His other properties enabled him to imbibe media properties such as the Atlantic Monthly and then the News and apparently to qualify him as pundit-for-all-seasons on the TV yack shows.
The one mogul missing was the one many were talking about: Rupert Murdoch, who the other day said he would never retire. Never ever. Megamogul Murdoch was on the minds of this media crowd first because of a disclosure in another new book, the one by New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. Auletta wrote that Murdoch’s New York Post, the right-wing rant sheet posing as a paper, loses $40 million a year. “They have now denied it, “said one man in the know, “but probably because it’s only $39.5 million.”
“MIKE-LITE” GOES FOX
But more immediate was the buzz du jour. Earlier in the day, Chris Wallace of ABC (and previously of NBC) announced that he was defecting to Fox News. He couldn’t have worked at CBS because his dad does. Known in the business as “Mike Lite,” he’s the son of the legendary CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace, who apparently waved the parental wand over his decision.
Chris says he likes “the energy” at Fox and their attitude that “the future is ahead of us and not behind us.” Outside of its talk shows Wallace said he “can’t find a conservative political bias at Fox.” Hello? “It’s very even-handed.” He is quoted as saying, “If you watch Fox across the day, its reporting is serious. It’s highly watchable. The packaging makes it very entertaining.”
Mike Lite says that the fox behind Fox, Roger Ailes, asked him only one “semi-political question” — “Can you wake up in the morning and assume that the United States isn’t wrong? I said that’s not a problem.”
Read on.
HOW FOXY IS FOX?
No sooner had Fox gloated about its big snatch, a report surfaces from inside Fox about how they assure that no one ever, ever assumes the United States is wrong — as long it is ruled by our own Republican Guard. Jim Romenesko’s Media News site is buzzing with debate about how Fox assures its own
Former Fox Producer CHARLIE REINA posted this:
So Chris Wallace says Fox News Channel really is fair and balanced. Well, I guess that settles it. We can all go home now. I mean, so what if Wallace’s salary as Fox’s newest big-name anchor ends with a whole lot of zeroes? So what if he hasn’t spent a day in the FNC newsroom yet?
My advice to the pundits: If you really want to know about bias at Fox, talk to the grunts who work there - the desk assistants, tape editors, writers, researchers and assorted producers who have to deal with it every day. Ask enough of them what goes on, promise them anonymity, and you’ll get the real story.
The fact is, daily life at FNC is all about management politics. I say this having served six years there - as producer of the media criticism show, News Watch, as a writer/producer of specials and (for the last year of my stay) as a newsroom copy editor. 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.”)
[CONSTANT CONTROL]
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.
Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox’s ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, 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.
[”THE MEMO” RULES ALL ]
But 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 FNC is becoming indistinguishable from the RNC.
“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. . . . 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.
These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management’s politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management’s point of view, and, in case they’re not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to
remind them. (www.poynter.org/forum/default.asp?id=32178)
COMMISSARS IN CONTROL
I read all this after spending the day in Washington with a former high-level military officer. He’s been studying how media coverage of the war has been massaged, manipulated and distorted by our own Ministry of Propaganda.
I will have more on this later, but here’s a juicy disclosure: It seems that all those years of studying the Soviet Union were not in vein for the hard-liners. They adapted one of the Communist Party’s favorite practices — infiltrating ideological commissars into the Red Army to make sure that the military men adhere to party doctrine. If you saw the movie The Hunt for Red October, about a nuclear sub on the loose, you may recall the conflict between the ship’s commander and the Party functionary.
Apparently the Rumsfeldian NeoCons loved the idea and have now introduced the “commissar” concept into our own military. We now have “political officers” attached to US military leaders to keep them in line and “on message.” Did you know that? Apparently even Iraq War commander Tommy Franks had one of these moles tethered to him. It was similar to the way the President has a man carrying the “football” (i.e., the military codes) with him at all times.
“HE’S MY MAN”
Learning from “the enemy” is not new. That is what’s behind the whole counterinsurgency idea — our guerillas fight theirs. But now as New York Times op-ed guerilla Maureen Dowd reminds us today, even the Commander-in-chief had a warm spot for
“He’s my man,” Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a “Comical Ali” and “Baghdad Bob,” who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!” and, “We are winning this war, and we will win the war. . . .
This is for sure.” Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.
Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. “The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react,” he said.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
It now turns out that the Bush White House was more involved in praising the boss than even we knew. Do you remember this recent press conference question?
Q: Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?
THE PRESIDENT: Nora, I think you ought to look at my speech. I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we’ve still got hard work to do, there’s still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank
the troops. The “Mission Accomplished” sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious,
by the way. . . .
The military seems to have contradicted the man they pledged to obey. AirForceTimes.com, which serves the Air Force, carries this caption on photos of that “Mission Accomplished” banner:
In the top photo, a “Mission Accomplished” banner graces the island of the carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1. In a speech to the ship’s crew, President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq. In the bottom photo, taken April 24, Bush’s staff had hung a similar banner. At Tuesday’s press conference, Bush said his staff had nothing to do with the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Later in the day, the Navy acknowledged the banner had been printed by the White House. (www.airforcetimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2346349.php)
In today’s Mission Accomplished news we learn that the number of US soldiers killed in combat in postwar Iraq is now above the number killed before that sign was posted…. The NY Times reports “The administration has told the Pentagon to speed up the process for putting Iraqi security forces on the streets, even if their training is significantly shortened.”… And USA Today advises:
Bangladesh and Portugal, two nations the Pentagon has pressed to send combat troops to Iraq, have decided against contributing to the U.S.-led force there. A third nation that once promised to send troops, South Korea, says it has not made up its mind and has delayed a decision pending further study. Turkey has agreed to send 10,000 troops but is waiting to hear from the Pentagon when and where they should go.
If the Coalition military can’t do the job, maybe it’s time to send in the Mississippi National Guard. The foot-in-the-mouth Senator from that great State, the Honorable Trent Lott, now says: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”
JUNKIES OF THE WORLD SAY THANK YOU
The UN says that Afghanistan is now liberating more poppy seed than ever. Reports the Mail and Guardian:
Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by “narco-terrorists” and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed. Two years after US airpower and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world’s biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates. (www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?a=13&o=32288)
YOUR LETTERS: ON THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
Palmer Frith responded to my blog yesterday on the JFK assassination:
It seems to me that there are three choices: Oswald acted alone, he was part of a conspiracy, or he was acting alone while others in a conspiracy exercised the assassination of President Kennedy. The Zapruder film showing the president’s head snapping back and the implausibility of the “magic bullet” make the first choice questionable. Choice three just seems too ironic to consider.
If Oswald were part of a conspiracy, it would seem to be important that the conspirators know that he would be on station in the Texas school book building on Elm St. when the parade went by. I know that he had worked there for about a month, but I’m not sure when it was decided that the parade would take the route it did. Maybe someone can help me with this. You see the problem if Oswald was already working in the building when the route was finalized, don’t you?
Also, how did he come to work there? Ruth Paine, who was allowing Oswald’s wife and children to live in her home and knew that Oswald was looking for work, testified that she discussed Oswald’s job search over coffee one morning with a neighbor. The neighbor’s brother worked at the TSBD, and said there might be an opening. So, Ruth Paine called the manager of the concern, Roy Truly.
“Mr. Truly hired Oswald to work at the warehouse at a different location, but he went to work at the Elm St. building as an order filler because the regular workers were busy replacing floors.
“So, if Oswald were part of a conspiracy, of course the conspirators would want him to be in that building at noon Nov. 22, 1963 to shoot out the window or be blamed for the deed. Since Mr. Truly hired him, and Ms. Paine called to refer him, both of them would have to be part of the conspiracy as well. I invite anyone to help me with this because it has troubled me for years.
John McCarthy sends some links, writing, “The following sites reflect those in close contact with the Warren Commission, those who testified about the magic bullet theory.”
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/hall/Mac.html
www.geocities.com/larryjodaniel/23.html
Finally Jackie Newberry calls on all of us to act:
ABC (Nightline and Nightly News), Lou Dobbs (CNN), and Jim Lehrer News Hour (PBS) all give the daily news of the latest “coalition” casualty count. I’d like to see the public pressuring them to provide Iraqi casualty count, in spite of the “coalition” suppression of release of information from Baghdad hospitals and restrictions on reporters to visit hospitals to gather facts and numbers on Iraqi casualties. And I’d like to see the public
demand it.
IN CLOSING . . .
I had some items to share on Israel, including the continuing police investigation implicating Ariel Sharon. But I will leave that for tomorrow.
My final item comes from WorldNetDaily.com that reports that the Israel Defense Force, noted for its excellence in building intercommunal respect is now training “Bomb-sniffing pigs to protect settlements. The reason: “Wild boars feared by Muslims, possess powerful snouts.” (www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35310)
Let’s keep our noses clear to smell out the lies and distortions that pollute the news stream. Sympathies to those losing homes and heart in the California fires, which only two stations in New York covered last Sunday when they were fiercest. And stay with us at Mediachannel.
You can write: dissector@mediachannel.org.
