Free Murdoch's World by David Folkenflik Page A

executive producer of a TV show starring Rush Limbaugh, and the head of financial news channel CNBC.
    His name was Roger Ailes.

    MSNBC LAUNCHED at about the same time. It was a partnership of Microsoft and the giant manufacturing and finance conglomerate GE’s NBC division. In short, its executives had very little idea of what they were doing other than amortizing NBC News’s costs across an additional channel. A parade of executives came and left in the ensuing decade.
    Under Ailes, Fox’s vision was clear and pure. Its cultural sensibility offered a modern version of a Mad Men world, where opinions were declarative: men were confident; professional women smart, young, and sleek. And it chased stories of dysfunction in Bill Clinton’s America.
    â€œI’ll tell you what television didn’t do at the time,” Ailes later told Esquire magazine. “It didn’t reflect what people really thought. I mean, they’re sitting there saying, ‘Wait a minute, New York’s going broke, Los Angeles is broke, the United States is broke, everything the government has run is broke, Social Security is broke, Medicareis broke, the military is broke, why do we want these guys making all these decisions for us?’”
    The American news consumer of just fifteen years ago would not have been able to recognize the country’s current media landscape—the range of choices, the technological innovations, and in particular the cacophony. And no other news organization has done more in recent years to reshape that terrain than Fox. Just about every news organization either mimics or reacts against the way Fox presents the news and the values it represents.
    That’s not because Fox News breaks many big stories. It doesn’t. (Part of the brilliance of its financial model is to have a lean reporting staff.) That’s not because the channel draws the biggest audiences in news. Nor does it do so in television news, with some exceptions, though it is a dominant force in cable television.
    What Fox News does, instead, is to determine what it believes should be the story of the day. It is a choice intended not just to select its own coverage, but to force others to pay attention—day after day. Fox News does so with an eye for episodes overlooked by other major news outlets. It particularly seeks storylines and themes that reflect and further stoke a sense of grievance among cultural conservatives against coastal elites.
    â€œCable news punches above its weight, if you look at its influence,” former Fox News vice president David Rhodes once told me. “How many people are actually watching it, from moment to moment?” The highest-rated shows draw between 2.5 and 3.3 million viewers on any given night, at most a bit more than 1 percent of the US population.
    When not inflamed, the channel’s anchors often look as though they’re having fun. And the network’s news staff includes some professionals whose work could appear on any number of outlets.
    At the outset, Ailes made a couple of key moves on the news side to shore up its credibility on the air. He hired John Moody, a veteran of Time magazine and United Press International (UPI), as a seniornews executive. Fox’s first reporters included Jon Scott and Gary Matsumoto of NBC. Catherine Crier of CNN and Court TV became an early anchor. Tammy Haddad, the executive producer and creator of CNN’s Larry King Live , was briefly employed to develop a Sunday public affairs interview show carried on both the Fox network and on the cable channel. As perhaps Washington’s premier booker of top-shelf guests, Haddad also helped to plot the show’s launch more generally. The first day, anchors interviewed Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole. For the desired core audience, the channel offered someone to root for, someone to