Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, said, "What I've done is taught
a lot of people not to rest on your laurels, to not think you can't do better.''
Posted on 11/07/2004 8:42:37 PM PST by Cableguy
As Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of its parent company, News Corporation, entertained their guests with cheeseburgers and hot dogs in a suite down the hall from the control room, Fox's cable news channel was dramatically consolidating its ratings gains of the past few years.
Fox News clobbered the other cable news networks, its 8.1 million viewers more than tripling its own election night prime-time performance in 2000. NBC, ABC and CBS, on the other hand, lost millions of viewers this year, according to Nielsen Media Research. And Fox News actually came closer to CBS in the ratings than CNN did to Fox News.
Yet the ratings bonanza presents a conundrum for Fox. It has long presented itself as the scrappy underdog, but its executives acknowledge that such a tactic becomes trickier when the network is ranked No. 1 among cable news channels.
Similarly, the network's success could undercut the very raison d'être of Fox News: that it exists as an alternative to what its executives and some of its on-air talent call, disdainfully and often, the media establishment. Fox News has now become popular enough - with an audience whose conservative political leanings track those of the voters who re-elected President Bush - to lay claim to its own place in the establishment.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Ailes wrestled with that identity crisis, alternating between exultation at the network's lead over CNN in the United States and expressions of hope that his employees would ignore what they had achieved.
"Everything in life is in your mind,'' Mr. Ailes said. "As long as we operate as underdogs, we're underdogs. The day we think we're No. 1, someone's going to sit down. And I don't want to walk into the newsroom and find anyone sitting down for very long.
"Being in the establishment has nothing to do with numbers,'' he added. "We'll always be the scrappy kids with the nose up against the glass.''To keep his staff hungry and maintain an us-vs.-them mentality, Mr. Ailes keeps upping the ante. Being the top-rated news channel on cable is far from his ultimate goal - he wants Fox News to be the top-rated cable network, period. That would mean nearly doubling its average daily viewership of 1.1 million to pass Nickelodeon.
Mr. Ailes is also pressing for earnings growth, adding that he is not content with profits "well north of $200 million'' that he said the network posted last year. And Fox News is moving ahead with plans that could result in the creation of a business news channel to take on CNBC, the cable channel that Mr. Ailes once led for General Electric.
These are heady times for a cable channel that was virtually ignored when it began in October 1996. MSNBC, the joint venture of NBC and Microsoft that began at about the same time, received significantly more news media attention.
But Mr. Ailes built a large newsgathering organization while adapting the talk-radio format to cable news. He allocated prime-time hours to opinionated, often conservative voices, and then watched the network gain viewers. Thanks to programs like "The O'Reilly Factor,'' which is currently the highest-rated cable news show, Fox News surpassed CNN in the ratings in January 2002 and now regularly attracts an average prime-time audience twice as large.
"You got in here when no one knew who you were, no one would return your calls,'' said Bill Shine, vice president of production for Fox News. "You'd try to book someone as a guest and they'd ask if you were the local affiliate. Now you've achieved some kind of success and you don't want it to go away.''
And Mr. Ailes's relentless management style pushes to keep that from happening. "What I've done is taught a lot of people not to rest on your laurels, to not think you can't do better,'' Mr. Ailes said.
Consider Paul Rittenberg, senior vice president of advertising sales at Fox News. He projects advertising revenues of $400 million for 2004, which he said would be a 30 percent increase over 2003. "Next year it better be $500 million,'' Mr. Rittenberg said, "or you'll be talking to someone else.''
A CNN spokeswoman, Christa Robinson, declined to comment, except to say that the network's revenues and profits were rising. The ratings of CNN's main domestic channel have also risen in recent months.
How Fox News performs in its continuing battle with CNN, which has more than a dozen networks, will play a large role in determining whether Mr. Rittenberg will reach his goals. CNN has long been able to charge higher advertising rates, even after Fox News eclipsed its ratings. In a front-page article in May, The Wall Street Journal estimated that Fox News was charging 75 to 80 percent of what CNN could get.
But Mr. Rittenberg contends that Fox has since eliminated that gap. A buyer at one prominent firm, Horizon Media, who insisted on anonymity so as not to burn bridges with either network, confirmed that the rates charged by the two were comparable.
But Ms. Robinson said that CNN charged more than Fox and received the higher rates because of its credibility and the number of "unique viewers'' it attracts. Fox News may reach a larger number of people in a given hour than CNN and they may watch Fox longer, but over the course of a month, more people watch CNN, according to Nielsen. "They act like the underdog because they are,'' Ms. Robinson said.
Mr. Rittenberg scoffs at the "unique viewer'' label. And some advertising buyers do not find that metric persuasive.
"As a buyer, the significance is consistency,'' said Sam Armando, director of television research for Starcom Worldwide, an advertising buyer. "If I'm looking for bigger audience, Fox News is the bigger audience.''
The advertising sales force at Fox News also has to deal with the cable network's reputation for leaning rightward, though not nearly as often as its corporate executives have had to defend against such charges.
While Mr. Ailes may have been a political adviser to three Republican presidents, he continues to vehemently rebut suggestions that the journalistic content offered on Fox News slants to the right. "Presenting a point of view is not necessarily biased,'' he said. "Eliminating a point of view is biased.''
The network eagerly takes up Mr. Ailes's claim. News organizations that label Fox News as conservative soon receive requests for corrections, even for a critic's work. Late last month Fox News's public relations staff pressed the editors of The Wall Street Journal for a correction after it ran an article about the Bush and Kerry strategies that mentioned the Bush campaign's media outreach. The resultant correction said that the News Corporation's Fox News "was incorrectly described" in a Page 1 article "as being sympathetic to the Bush cause."
Critics, including dogged liberal organizations like Media Matters, have begged to differ, and the network's coverage of the presidential campaign has provided them with plenty of fodder.
Discussing the impact of the recent Osama bin Laden video just before the election, Neil Cavuto, an anchor on Fox News, said the Qaeda leader was in effect wearing a campaign button for Mr. Kerry. And in early October, Fox News reprimanded its chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for fabricating several quotes ostensibly uttered by Mr. Kerry - many of them about a manicure - in a mock article mistakenly posted, briefly, on the Fox News Web site.
Asked if such examples were evidence of a conservative bias, Mr. Ailes laughed.
"Sometimes our people joke,'' Mr. Ailes said. "Sometimes it gets on the air.
"We'd rather do that,'' he added, "than have our shorts in a bunch, thinking we're really, really important.''
Tim Graham, a representative for the Media Research Center, which labels itself a conservative organization, said that although he thought it was easier to prove liberal bias at the broadcast networks than conservative bias at Fox News, he took issue with Mr. Ailes's blanket dismissal of such incidents. "You can only go so far with the 'that's just humor' defense,'' Mr. Graham said.
"These are the sorts of things that, if we see this with liberals, if someone made fun of Bush for being stupid, we would certainly notice and say, 'Bingo! That's evidence for us! That makes our case,' '' he said.
What seems less open to debate is that the audience for Fox News mirrors the majority that re-elected the president.
In June, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that the percentage of Fox News viewers who identify themselves as Republican was 41 percent, compared to 29 percent who identified themselves as Democrats, and that 52 percent of Fox viewers identified themselves as conservative. (CNN, by contrast, was found to be more popular with Democratic viewers.)
Mr. Ailes said he regarded the study as "a totally fraudulent survey done by a bunch of liberals.''
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said, "It's a classic case of shoot the messenger.'' Mr. Kohut said his organization's financing came from a nonpartisan source, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the survey results had been replicated in other studies. He added that Fox News's commentators had had no problem quoting approvingly from an earlier study by his organization - one that suggested that the news media was increasingly liberal.
Regardless of how Mr. Ailes characterizes his programming and audience, the Bush administration has endorsed its approach to the news, however indirectly. Journalists, including Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, have pointed out numerous instances in which television sets turned on by the White House staff or Bush campaign were preset to Fox News.
But whether that has resulted in the White House giving Fox an edge in its coverage, or whether it puts the channel in a better position for scoops during a Bush second term, is difficult to prove, according to several White House correspondents. For example, while Mr. Bush gave interviews to Mr. O'Reilly and another Fox News host, Sean Hannity, in the last weeks of the campaign, he also made himself available to Tom Brokaw on NBC and Charles Gibson on ABC.
Brian Besanceney, a White House spokesman, had no immediate comment. Mr. Ailes said the network had no inside track.
"We get worse access,'' Mr. Ailes said. "We're shown no favoritism. We don't want any. We're fine.''
i could NOT care less if a network is "fair, balanced and unafraid..." what i am looking for is, "does it report the truth?" (op/eds aside, of course)...
Well .. if the NYT or CNN would be interested in complying with the wishes of the WH .. they might get some of the "exclusive" interviews.
I remember when Jessica Lynch was captured, along with other soldiers, and several of them had been killed. The Pentagon had asked the MSM & FOX to remain silent until they had all the facts. Of course, only ONE STATION COMPLIED WITH THE PENTAGON'S REQUEST .. FOX.
Shortly after that, FOX recieved an exclusive interview with General Myers. To me .. all the other "exclusive" interviews are a result of FOX being willing to keep the story under wraps until the details could be confirmed.
Ailes and Fox have brilliantly used conservatives to launch their network.
But, like politicians, when they reach the top, they start moving to the center to capture the widest possible acceptance.
Sadly, Fox isn't nearly as conservative as it was 3-4 years ago. It was nice while it lasted.
O'Reilly, Shep, and Greta are not conservative. Hanity and Colmes is balanced...really heavily in our favor, but only because Colmes sucks and his party sucks. Fox is fair and balanced just as advertised.
I still thought Fox did a poor job on election night.
I sure miss that guy......
FOX, IMHO, is slipping a bit in the quality of their prime-time shows. O'Reilly is a waste, Greta is all Scott Peterson, all the time, and Hannity and Colmes has the same boring guests over and over. While Joe Scarborough has been irritating sometimes in his sucking up to the RATs, he's had much more interesting guests on over the past few months than FOX has. Hardball has had better guests as well.
NBC, ABC and CBS, on the other hand, lost millions of viewers this year
You think that they will start telling the truth?
I DO NOT want their opinion of the news.
I want the news........
read later.
Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, said, "What I've done is taught
a lot of people not to rest on your laurels, to not think you can't do better.''
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my FoxFan list. *Warning: This can be a high-volume ping list at times.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.