Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
How Rupert's red-state cable channel waved the flag and beat CNN.
Apr 24, 2004 | Caution, you're about to enter a No Spin Zone. Or is it the Twilight Zone? We'll report, and you decide, based on this recent "unspun" news update from Fox News' flagship primetime program "The O'Reilly Factor."
"Why are some Americans hindering the war on terror?" O'Reilly barked at the camera. "As we predicted, President Bush's poll numbers have gone up after last week's press conference. The elite media wanted Mr. Bush to grovel, but he remains defiant and determined to fight the terror war his way. Today the Supreme Court heard arguments that the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay should have lawyers and due process. Predictably, the New York Times wants lawyers for the accused terrorists, editorializing that some of them 'may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
"Sure. They just took a wrong turn into Uzbekistan and wandered onto the battlefield. How ridiculous is that?"
Remember, the Spin Stops Here.
There was a time, not too long ago, when Fox News was a joke -- albeit a bad and sick one -- to liberals and TV journalists raised on Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley. But even those who rue the success of Rupert Murdoch's flag-waving cable channel have to admit: The old boy has done it. CNN founder Ted Turner once famously mocked Murdoch, saying he'd squish his cable news rival like a bug. We all know now who has squished whom.
Just check the Nielsens: When the president gave his prime-time press conference last week, 5.2 million viewers watched on Fox News, compared to CNN's 1.7 million and MSNBC's 867,000 viewers. For the year, Fox ranks ninth among all cable networks in primetime, averaging 1.4 million viewers. CNN and MSNBC don't even make the Top 20. In 20th place: The Home and Garden Network.
How the erstwhile journalistic laughingstock Fox News -- or "Faux News," as mocking bloggers know it -- managed to climb atop the cable news industry in the 1990s is the topic of Los Angeles Times television reporter Scott Collins' often entertaining book "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN." Collins traces Fox's scrappy success -- and the simultaneous tanking of rivals CNN and MSNBC -- through the colorful characters who have ruled the seamy journalistic underworld of cable news over the past decade while detailing the wheeling and dealing that made Fox's success possible.
At its core, Collins' book is a business story. Drama and suspense ensue from backbiting rivalries among the cable news players, behind-the-scenes jockeying and big media mergers. It's laced with killer quotes that buoy the story along. Ted Turner, who didn't sit for an interview but still gives nutty commentary, likens himself to a genitally mutilated African girl, saying he'd been "clitorized" by Time Warner. Turner tells TV producer Rick Kaplan he's the "biggest goddamned Jew" he'd ever seen. Ailes, also with a flair for the outlandish, offered this take on the failed MSNBC experiment to pit Phil Donahue against Fox golden boy Bill O'Reilly: "[Donahue] made his name convincing all the women in America that their husbands were fucking their secretaries. Now all those women are 65 or 70, and they want their husband to go anywhere. They don't care who he's fucking. They didn't want [Donahue] on nuclear proliferation. They didn't give a shit."
