All sound, fury, and popular entertainment: one decade on, Fox is top dog in the ratings
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
The Independent
It is the night of the Bush-Gore presidential election in 2000, perhaps the weirdest of all moments in America's recent political history. Already, the key state of Florida has been kicked around like a football – placed in the Gore column for a couple of hours and then, because of erroneous exit-polling data, yanked back and deemed too close to call.
The network anchors are settling in for a long night. On CBS, Dan Rather says the heat from Florida is "hot enough to peel house paint". Over at Fox News, the runt of the American cable news litter, the election desk is being manned by a certain John Ellis, who just happens to be George and Jeb Bush's first cousin. According to a new book by David Moore, a Gallup poll election veteran who was doing a very similar job that night for CBS and CNN, Ellis spent much of his evening on the phone to the Bush brothers.
At 2.15 am on the East Coast, Ellis shouts out excitedly: "Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it!" Jebbie is, of course, the governor of Florida as well as the Republican candidate's brother. Seconds later, Fox calls the election for Bush. Within minutes, the other networks have followed suit – not because their polling data supports the call, but because they are terrified of being beaten to the punch by some puny little cable station.
The call, of course, turns out to be as erroneous as the earlier one for Gore, and the election is destined to go on for another 36 agonising days. But in the meantime a new phenomenon in American television news has been born.
Election night 2000 was the moment Fox News – owned by Rupert Murdoch, and run by a veteran media consultant to the Republican Party – won its spurs and made sure it would never again be underestimated by the media punditocracy. The station has gone on in much the same spirit as it approached that extraordinary night, purporting to be a disinterested bearer of the day's tidings, while in fact pushing a very specific Republican agenda. Its fortunes have been bound, with almost uncanny closeness, to those of George W Bush – soaring in the audience ratings when the president has himself pushed the peaks of his popularity, then slumping as the aura that attached itself to the White House in the immediate aftermath of September 11 has dulled almost to the point of invisibility.
Fox nonetheless remains the number one cable news station. In a few short years, it has almost entirely rewritten the rules of American television news coverage, influencing its ideological nemeses as much as its bedfellows with its penchant for presenting politics as a form of gladiatorial sport – all sound, fury and popular entertainment, in which fact and reasoned analysis are ditched in favour of outrage, anger and patriotic pride.
Today, Fox News celebrates its 10th anniversary, but really the station has lived through two distinct phases. In the first phase, from 1996 to the 2000 election, it was the also-ran of American broadcast journalism, the cable offshoot of what was already a marginal network. Fox, at that time, was known for airing The Simpsons, not for its news coverage. Correspondents at Fox News had trouble getting accreditation with major government agencies and had to fight for a place on presidential plane trips. Its political proclivities became clear during the Clinton impeachment saga in 1998, but the furore over Monica Lewinsky, the Kenneth Starr report and the rest was so widespread that the station had trouble getting itself noticed.
Since 2000, Fox has evolved, essentially, into the White House's news poodle – pushing the (non-existent) links between Saddam Hussein and September 11, talking up every report of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, both before the 2003 invasion and since, playing to the country's fear of another al-Qa'ida attack and reinforcing the notion that only Republicans have the resolve to keep Americans safe. When Republican politicians feel vulnerable – like Dick Cheney after he accidentally shot a friend on a hunting trip to Texas earlier this year – they talk to Fox News, and no other outlet. When Democrats feel the need to reach out to the other side, as party chairman Howard Dean does from time to time and Bill Clinton did as recently as two weeks ago, they stick their heads into the lion's den and pride themselves when they feel that they have re-emerged alive.
(The rest is here.)
The Independent
It is the night of the Bush-Gore presidential election in 2000, perhaps the weirdest of all moments in America's recent political history. Already, the key state of Florida has been kicked around like a football – placed in the Gore column for a couple of hours and then, because of erroneous exit-polling data, yanked back and deemed too close to call.
The network anchors are settling in for a long night. On CBS, Dan Rather says the heat from Florida is "hot enough to peel house paint". Over at Fox News, the runt of the American cable news litter, the election desk is being manned by a certain John Ellis, who just happens to be George and Jeb Bush's first cousin. According to a new book by David Moore, a Gallup poll election veteran who was doing a very similar job that night for CBS and CNN, Ellis spent much of his evening on the phone to the Bush brothers.
At 2.15 am on the East Coast, Ellis shouts out excitedly: "Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it!" Jebbie is, of course, the governor of Florida as well as the Republican candidate's brother. Seconds later, Fox calls the election for Bush. Within minutes, the other networks have followed suit – not because their polling data supports the call, but because they are terrified of being beaten to the punch by some puny little cable station.
The call, of course, turns out to be as erroneous as the earlier one for Gore, and the election is destined to go on for another 36 agonising days. But in the meantime a new phenomenon in American television news has been born.
Election night 2000 was the moment Fox News – owned by Rupert Murdoch, and run by a veteran media consultant to the Republican Party – won its spurs and made sure it would never again be underestimated by the media punditocracy. The station has gone on in much the same spirit as it approached that extraordinary night, purporting to be a disinterested bearer of the day's tidings, while in fact pushing a very specific Republican agenda. Its fortunes have been bound, with almost uncanny closeness, to those of George W Bush – soaring in the audience ratings when the president has himself pushed the peaks of his popularity, then slumping as the aura that attached itself to the White House in the immediate aftermath of September 11 has dulled almost to the point of invisibility.
Fox nonetheless remains the number one cable news station. In a few short years, it has almost entirely rewritten the rules of American television news coverage, influencing its ideological nemeses as much as its bedfellows with its penchant for presenting politics as a form of gladiatorial sport – all sound, fury and popular entertainment, in which fact and reasoned analysis are ditched in favour of outrage, anger and patriotic pride.
Today, Fox News celebrates its 10th anniversary, but really the station has lived through two distinct phases. In the first phase, from 1996 to the 2000 election, it was the also-ran of American broadcast journalism, the cable offshoot of what was already a marginal network. Fox, at that time, was known for airing The Simpsons, not for its news coverage. Correspondents at Fox News had trouble getting accreditation with major government agencies and had to fight for a place on presidential plane trips. Its political proclivities became clear during the Clinton impeachment saga in 1998, but the furore over Monica Lewinsky, the Kenneth Starr report and the rest was so widespread that the station had trouble getting itself noticed.
Since 2000, Fox has evolved, essentially, into the White House's news poodle – pushing the (non-existent) links between Saddam Hussein and September 11, talking up every report of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, both before the 2003 invasion and since, playing to the country's fear of another al-Qa'ida attack and reinforcing the notion that only Republicans have the resolve to keep Americans safe. When Republican politicians feel vulnerable – like Dick Cheney after he accidentally shot a friend on a hunting trip to Texas earlier this year – they talk to Fox News, and no other outlet. When Democrats feel the need to reach out to the other side, as party chairman Howard Dean does from time to time and Bill Clinton did as recently as two weeks ago, they stick their heads into the lion's den and pride themselves when they feel that they have re-emerged alive.
(The rest is here.)
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