Insider exposes Fox News right-wing bias:
Fox News: The inside story
A former Fox producer describes the ways -- both subtle and blunt -- that top executives impose a right-wing ideology on the newsroom.
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By Tim Grieve
Oct. 31, 2003 | When veteran television journalist Chris Wallace announced this week that he was leaving ABC for Fox News, reporters asked him whether he was concerned about trading in his objectivity for Fox's rightward slant. "I had the same conception a lot of people did about Fox News, that they have a right-wing agenda," Wallace told The Washington Post. But after watching Fox closely, Wallace said, he had decided that the network suffered from an "unfair rap," and that its reporting is, in fact, "serious, thoughtful and even-handed."
It was all too much for Charlie Reina to take. Reina, 55, spent six years at Fox as a producer, copy editor and writer, working both on hard news stories and on feature programs like "News Watch" and "After Hours." He quit in April, he says, in a fit of frustration over salary, job assignments and respect. Since that time, he has watched the debate over whether Fox is really "fair and balanced." He held his fire, bit his tongue. But then he heard Chris Wallace -- an outsider to Fox, for now -- proclaim the network fair. Reina couldn't remain silent any longer, and so he fired off a long post to Jim Romenesko's message board at the Poynter Institute. In his view, he was setting the Fox record straight.
"The fact is," Reina wrote, "daily life at FNC is all about management politics." Reina said that Fox's daily news coverage -- and its daily news bias -- is driven by an "editorial note" sent to the newsroom every morning by John Moody, a Fox senior vice president. The editorial note -- a memo posted on Fox's computer system -- tells the staff which correspondents are working on which stories. But frequently, Reina says, it also contains hints, suggestions and directives on how to slant the day's news -- invariably, he says, in a way that's consistent with the politics and desires of the Bush administration.
Before starting work at Fox in 1997, Reina had a long career in broadcast journalism. He worked on the broadcast wire at the Associated Press, wrote copy for CBS radio news and worked on ABC's "Good Morning America." Along the way, he says, no one ever told him how to slant a story -- until he started working at Fox. At the "fair and balanced" network, Reina says, he and his colleagues were frequently told -- sometimes directly, usually more subtly -- to toe the Republican Party line.
Reina is out of journalism for the moment -- he's running his own woodworking business in suburban New York -- and he realizes that going public about his experience at Fox won't improve his career prospects. He says he doesn't care.
Fox did not respond to calls or a faxed letter from Salon seeking comment on Reina's tenure at the network or his comments about news values there. But Reina has plainly hit a nerve. Late Thursday, Romenesko posted a response to Reina's note that appeared to be from Sharri Berg, a vice president for news operations at Fox. The response called Reina a "disgruntled employee" with "an ax to grind." And Berg included comments she attributed to an unnamed Fox staffer who described Reina as one "any number of clueless feature producers" who made inane calls to the news desk, "the kind of calls where after you hung up you say to the phone, 'go f?k yourself.'" Berg quoted the newsroom employee as saying, "[I]t's not editorial policy that pisses off newsroom grunts -- it's people like Charlie."
Reina said he wouldn't dignify Berg's note with a response. All I can say is, everybody there knows what the politics of the bosses are. You feel it every day, and in good part because of this daily editorial note that comes out. I suppose there are similar things [at other networks] which say who's stationed where that day, where the correspondents are, what we'll be covering and so on. But [in the Fox memo], oftentimes when there are issues that involve political controversy and debate or what have you, there are also these admonitions, these subtle things like, "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."
That's something you just don't see in a traditional newsroom. You see a news budget going around, but they'd be a lot like an AP budget -- here's this story, here's this story, this person is writing this. It makes sense to have something like that -- something that says here's where everybody is and so forth. But now, for the first time with the advent of the memo, you're actually getting little bits of guidance here and there.
Would it have been unusual at AP or CBS or ABC to hear that management wanted a story tweaked in a certain ideological direction?
You didn't use to have the direct involvement of the big bosses. But at Fox, it's an everyday thing, a presence in the newsroom. You know, if you make a joke, and it's politically slanted and it's not toward the Republican side, somebody will say to you, "Watch it." It doesn't mean that you would get in trouble, that Roger [Ailes] would be there or something, but there's just that fear at all times.
Are the employees at Fox ideologically aligned with Ailes?
I don't think that's the case. There are probably more people there who tend to be conservative or Republican than I have encountered at other places. And I have to say that they're right when they say that people in journalism tend to be liberal or Democrat. Again, I haven't found that that had much of an effect on the news. But it certainly does at Fox. There are many people who work at Fox, as there are elsewhere, that are much more liberal and Democrat-leaning than management is.
But what's also true is that it's such a young staff of workers. Many of the people who write news copy, for instance, had no experience writing before they started. So there's no background in writing, and as a result they're very easy to mold.
The memo sort of gives you hints. If they [Fox executives] are worried that what we write or what the anchors say might make the wrong point, it will show up in the memo ... [The line producers] are mostly eager young people. They've got a grueling job hour-to-hour. It's just too much trouble for them to try to buck the system. They've got so much to do that they just don't want to have to explain [why they didn't comply with the direction in the memo]. So everything gets done pretty much the way management wants it.
Can you remember a specific instance in which one of your superiors told you to approach a story with a particular ideological slant?
It was, I would say, about three years ago. I was assigned to do a special on the environment, some issue involving pollution. When my boss and I talked as to what this thing was all about, what they were looking for, he said to me: "You understand, you know, it's not going to come out the pro-environmental side." And I said, "It will come out however it comes out." And he said, "You can obviously give both sides, but just make sure that the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word."
Fair and balanced?
Yeah. I thought about it and thought about it and I went to him the next morning and I said, "I can't do this, I've never started out a project with an idea of what the outcome should be -- and certainly to be told that. And I'm not going to do it." Fortunately, he was wise enough to know that what he had done was wrong, and he left it alone.
Part of what Fox's message is, and I have to say that to a certain extent I agree with it, is that political correctness is a terrible thing. There are a lot of assumptions that are simply made and not questioned, and a lot of that, liberals like me have perpetrated. And I have to agree that there's too much of that.
But isn't there also a political orthodoxy on the right that Fox enforces?
Yeah, I was going to get to that ...
I'll give you another example from that memo. When the Palestinian suicide bombings started last year, shortly after they started, one of the memos came down and suggested, "Wouldn't it be better if we used 'homicide bombing' because the word 'suicide' puts the focus on and memorializes the perpetrator rather than the victims?" OK, never mind the fact that any bombing that kills is a homicide bombing. What would you call a suicide bombing where the perpetrator isn't killed? An intended suicidal homicide bombing? It got ridiculous.
* I also know a guy at Fox who told me there is an unwritten rule you do not criticize Bush. No other network slants this way, only talk radio and some newspapers like the Washington Times. |
