"Inside the Media"
_______________________________
Sunday Shopping With Fox News
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 27, 2003; Page C01
Fox News executives believed Tony Snow did a solid job in his seven years as a Sunday morning host, but that it was time for a change.
The leading candidate to replace him as host of "Fox News Sunday," network sources say, is Chris Wallace, and a deal could be finalized as early as this week. Landing the ABC correspondent, an aggressive journalist with no obvious political leanings, would be a coup for the "fair and balanced" network, which is widely viewed as catering to a conservative audience.
Wallace, the son of "60 Minutes" legend Mike Wallace, is a Sunday morning veteran who was moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press" in 1987-88. While leaving his high-profile ABC job to host the fourth-rated Sunday show might seem an unusual leap, it would give him star billing in a growing news division.
Snow, an occasional Rush Limbaugh substitute, is stepping down to start a radio show that will be syndicated by Fox. "I've been wanting to do radio for a long time and you've got to make some choices," says Snow, who will continue as a Fox News commentator. Radio "has a sense of immediacy" and "you end up talking about your personal life and all sorts of things that connect with people."
But the radio idea was also a way of easing Snow out at a time when Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes believes that the program needs a jump-start, network sources say. "I never heard anybody saying to me, 'We don't think you're doing the job,' " says Snow, calling his exit "a convergence of interests."
Brit Hume, who sits on the Sunday panel, would be an obvious candidate, but Fox's Washington managing editor wants to concentrate on his own nightly cable show. "I'm not going to work eight days a week," Hume says. With a weekend show "you work Saturday, Sunday, you prepare for interviews and probably get involved in booking them."
Besides, says Hume, "I like occasionally to express an analytical opinion," which he can do as a panelist but not as host.
With an average of 1.6 million viewers, "Fox News Sunday" is the only Sunday broadcast show whose viewership is up this year, from 1.3 million in the same period last year. But it still trails "Meet the Press" (4.2 million), CBS's "Face the Nation" (2.7 million) and ABC's "This Week" (2.5 million). Fox executives say they hope a new anchor will generate greater support from affiliate stations that do little or no news and offer church programming as a Sunday lead-in.
Snow, who worked in the first Bush White House, is viewed by some at the network as a likable but politically polarizing figure. With Ailes's encouragement, he dropped his syndicated newspaper column in 2001 after complaints that his conservative opinions were clashing with his neutral moderator's role.
"I'm going to be committing opinions on radio," which was hard to do as a Sunday host because "you don't want a bunch of ticked-off guests," says Snow.
Leak Etiquette
When Donald Rumsfeld was asked this month about his reduced role in a revamped U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq, the defense secretary essentially outed a source.
"The president didn't make an announcement," he told European reporters. "Condi Rice apparently backgrounded the New York Times."
There's no way to know for sure whether the "senior administration officials" quoted by the Times in reporting that Rice would run a new Iraq Stabilization Group included the national security adviser herself. But the episode shows that the sort of high-level leaking that President Bush has condemned in the case of CIA operative Valerie Plame continues to be an everyday practice in Washington.
Week after week, senior administration officials -- let's call them SAOs -- talk to reporters on Air Force One, in briefing rooms and on the phone, a ritual in which journalists freely trade anonymity for access.
After two SAOs told columnist Robert Novak that the wife of a prominent Bush critic worked for the CIA, the president told his senior staff he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer interview with, um, a senior administration official. (White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters last week there was "no truth" to that story.)
Bob Deans, White House correspondent for Cox Newspapers, says journalists have pressed McClellan for more access to these senior officials. At the same time, he says, "survey after survey shows that when readers see the word 'official' with no name attached, they're suspicious. . . . When a senior official briefs 40, 50 or 60 reporters in a room, we feel like that really ought to be on the record."
But for the White House, says Deputy Communications Director Suzy DeFrancis, "the concern about a lot of leaks is that no one's approved them to go out and say this. Many times these leaks cut off the president's options before he has the chance to weigh in. When Dr. Rice or others go out as a senior administration official, those are statements of administration policy or the president's views. The other leaks may not even reflect the president's views."
In recent weeks, SAOs have yakked about such topics as Korea and pensions to The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other outlets.
For a president, says Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, "leaks are things people say that he doesn't want to see in print, and 'background' is stuff that people say anonymously that he does want to appear in print. Since reporters live off leaks, I'm not inclined to complain that the Bush administration is talking too much." But it's deflating, McManus says, when an anonymous briefer "appears on television on Sunday morning and says the exact same thing under the klieg lights."
Geneva Overholser, a University of Missouri School of Journalism professor, says: "We have a president who says he doesn't want his people speaking off the record and dispatches his people in the normal course of events to speak off the record." But she also faults the press for complicity, saying that when she was The Washington Post's ombudsman, she sometimes heard reporters "offering" officials this arrangement: "I don't need to quote you by name."
Sometimes the delicate dance is almost comical. Before the president left for Asia, Rice said in an on-the-record briefing that the first stop, in Tokyo, would be a "layover." On the flight, a senior administration official backtracked by saying: "When you go to Japan, it's never a layover. This is one of our best friends, one of our best allies." The senior official was Rice.
Improving Reality
People magazine doctored a cover photo of Courteney Cox and David Arquette, removing people and shrubbery from the background, moving the stars' heads closer together and digitally creating a blue sky. This is odd, says the magazine Photo District News, because People editor Martha Nelson told USA Today that she would never combine photos because "for us, it really is about journalism." A People statement says the manipulation was done to "improve readability" of the headlines and text and that "in retrospect, we would probably reconsider these changes."
Tears of Joy?
Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House has a tendency to get weepy. According to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, House cried when the Journal won a Pulitzer last year, again at a management retreat and "on nine occasions during our two interviews." Must have been quite a grilling.
washingtonpost.com |
