Fox News' Ailes takes jab at competitors, blasts 'biased' polls
Media Mix
By Peter Johnson
Fox News chief Roger Ailes said he didn't get "too worked up" by a Pew study last month that showed that Fox has more Republican viewers than CNN or MSNBC and that his reporters and anchors insert their opinions into stories far more than competitors do. Numbers might have something to do with it: Fox is beating the combined audience of the other two.
Speaking at a media breakfast last week, Ailes at first said he couldn't think of a single thing that No. 2-rated CNN does better than Fox — except get better press. CNN chief "Jonathan Klein is getting 50 great stories about what they are doing there, one of which is he thinks that there are not enough liberals in the newsroom ... 'need more progressives.' God, I hope he believes that," Ailes said.
(What Klein told PBS' Charlie Rose on March 23 was that a "progressive" cable channel would not appeal to Fox's audience, which he described as "mostly angry white men ... who tend to like to have their points of view reinforced." Said CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson: "In Fox's fantasy world, they like to think that's what the president of CNN goes around saying, but, unfortunately for them, it's just not true.")
Of MSNBC, the also-ran of cable news, Ailes said, "They've hired every blonde who hasn't worked for us, and it's not working. I'm not sure how they're going to get out of that ditch." (No comment from MSNBC.)
And so it went for an hour at the media forum featuring Ailes, an outspoken former Republican political operative turned cable-news superstar, fielding questions from New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta.
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism study found that in covering the Iraq war last year, 73% of Fox stories included opinion from anchors and reporters, compared with 29% on MSNBC and just 2% on CNN. But Ailes dismissed Pew as a "liberal lobbying organization." He said, "Most polls today are not taken to provide information to the public but to get press for the organization taking the polls. I took a poll of Pew, and 98% of my organization found that they were biased." The crowd of 300 roared.
(In response, Project director Tom Rosenstiel said the study "was not a poll. It was a content analysis designed by a four-university research team and executed at the University of Alabama." One plus for Fox, he said, was that researchers found Fox News stories were more forthcoming about sourcing than their cable rivals.)
Ailes said the journalism on cable news, because it has 168 hours a week to fill, "sometimes is light because the depth of investigative resource is not there. We rely on AP. We rely on other people for stories and, as you know today, you have assertion journalism as opposed to fact journalism going on. You've got people pulling from sources and not checking them."
But he said Fox's journalism is in fine shape and noted that Fox News hasn't faced the kind of journalism scandals that have hit other news organizations. "We have not been investigated, and we have not fired our lead anchors, our producers and our executive editors. So our stuff has been pretty good."
Ailes said Fox News has no agenda. His charge to his reporters and anchors is simple: "If you make a mistake, get on the air as fast as you can and admit it. ... Do your homework. Make sure you reach out to a point of view you don't agree with to be sure you have some balance in your piece, because journalists, despite the public perception, are not empty-headed fools. They actually come to the job with some ideas and biases."
When Auletta asked him whether the media have a "conscious bias," Ailes said: "I don't know whether it's conscious or not. I think people who are biased to the left and right are by and large honest people who bring their life experience to whatever their beliefs are. I don't think there's some conspiracy of bias to the left, but I do think that New York and Los Angeles have different views than many people that I know from other parts of the country."
Contributing: E-mail pjohnson@usatoday.com
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