media

Tim Rutten:
Regarding Media
Miles from 'fair and balanced'

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October 29, 2003

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October 25, 2003

If it sounds like anti- Semitism, maybe it is
October 18, 2003

Tough to get a read on writers
October 15, 2003

A veteran producer this week alleged that Fox News executives issue a
daily
memorandum to staff on news coverage to bend the network's reporting
into
conformity with management's political views, refocusing attention on
the
partisan bias of America's most watched cable news operation.

The charges by Charlie Reina, 55, whose six-year tenure at Fox ended
April
9, first surfaced Wednesday in a letter he posted on an influential Web
site
(www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45) maintained by Jim Romenesko for the
Poynter Institute, an organization that promotes journalistic education
and
ethics.

Concerns about Fox, which styles its news coverage as "fair and
balanced,"
begin with its owner, Australian-born Rupert Murdoch. The corporate
boards
and family investors who control most of the American news media
generally
feel obliged to maintain a wall of separation between news and editorial

opinion. Murdoch, by contrast, operates in the style of the traditional
Fleet Street proprietors, who dismiss such distinctions as inconvenient
fictions.

And as a deeply conservative man, he is willing to put his money where
his
politics are: Murdoch, a naturalized U.S. citizen, subsidizes
publication of
the Weekly Standard, one of the country's most influential right-wing
journals. According to a forthcoming book by the New Yorker's Ken
Auletta,
he loses as much as $40 million a year maintaining the New York Post as
an
outlet of conservatism in Manhattan.

As Fox's founding president, he hired Roger Ailes, a shrewd Republican
political operative who earned a well-founded reputation for
bare-knuckle
campaigning while working for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As one of
the
architects of the elder George Bush's media strategy in his campaign for

president against Democratic rival Michael Dukakis, Ailes helped devise
the
notorious Willie Horton commercials. As he told Time magazine in August
1988, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife
in
his hand or without it."

The late Lee Atwater, another Bush aide, described Ailes as having "two
speeds - attack and destroy." Before joining Fox, where he serves now as

chairman, Ailes produced Rush Limbaugh's short-lived television talk
show.

According to Reina's letter, "Daily life at [Fox] is all about
management
politics....Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control
and
vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct.
First,
it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political
operatives
of recent times. Everyone there understands that [Fox] 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 nonunion, with no protections regarding
what
they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big
boss."

Fox News spokesman Rob Zimmerman told The Times that "these accusations
are
the rantings of a bitter, disgruntled former employee. It's unfortunate
that
Charlie's career ended the way it did, but we wish him well." Asked
whether
Reina's quotations from the memos were inaccurate or taken out of
context,
Zimmerman said, "All we are saying is that these are false accusations."
The
Times' request to speak with Ailes was denied: "Roger is not addressing
this
and is not available," Zimmerman said.

Reina, who told The Times he left Fox in a dispute over salary and
workload - not politics - hardly comes across as a knee-jerk liberal. He
is
at pains, for example, to say that he believes his former employer's
cable
rivals - CNN and MSNBC - also air news reports riven with bias on both
ends
of the political spectrum. At Fox, he not only produced the network's
weekly
media criticism show, "News-Watch," but also a series of specials on
Newt
Gingrich and a talk show with conservative religious commentator Cal
Thomas.

Still, Reina, whose 30-year career includes stints at the Associated
Press,
ABC News and CBS, said Fox's ideological problems begin with Ailes.

"Roger is such a high-profile and partisan political operative that
everyone
in the newsroom knows what his political feelings are and acts
accordingly.
I'd never worked in a newsroom like that," he said in an interview.
"Never.
At ABC, for example, I never knew what management or my bosses'
political
views were, much less felt pressure from them to make things come out a
certain way. I'm talking about news bias, and I never experienced it
there.
At CBS or the AP, if a word got in that suggested bias - liberal or
conservative - it was taken out.

"At Fox it was all about viewpoint. I'm not talking about the nighttime
personalities. I'm talking about the news report. Fox executives will
say
their network only appears conservative because it is fair, when
everyone
else is liberal and biased. That's bull. Fox doesn't 'seem' conservative
and
Republican. It is conservative and Republican."

In his letter, Reina wrote that "the roots of [Fox's] day-to-day on-air
bias
are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo"
written
by John Moody, the network's vice president for news, and "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 [Fox]....

"For instance, from the March 20th memo: 'There is something utterly
incomprehensible about [U.N. Secretary-General] 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'?....

"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."

Av Westin, a longtime ABC news executive who is now executive director
of
the National Television Academy, examined Reina's letter and said:
"Nothing
about this surprises me. The uniform smirks and body language that are
apparent in Fox's reports throughout the day reflect an operation that
is
quite tightly controlled. The fact that young and inexperienced
producers
acquiesce to that control by pulling stories is further evidence that
nonjournalistic forces are at work in that newsroom.

"Roger runs the place with an iron hand and he was put in place there by

Murdoch, who selected him for his politics. In that sense, what's
happened
at Fox is a carry-over from all Murdoch's print publications, where the
publisher's politics and editorial preference is reflected in the news
hole
to an extent that isn't true anywhere else in American journalism."

Reina is out of television news these days, supporting himself in New
York
with a small woodworking business.

Looking back on his time with Fox, his greatest concern is for its young

staff. "Many of them wanted to be on television but not necessarily in
news.
They haven't had the benefit of traditional journalistic training, so
they're easily molded.

"Time after time I watched what management's politics did to the young
anchors. As they near the time to get their own show, the hair gets
blonder
and the bias gets clearer."

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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