Free Murdoch's World by David Folkenflik Page B

root against, and someone to vote for.
    On the first day, Bill O’Reilly, formerly of ABC, CBS, and the tabloid television show Inside Edition , appeared on his new program the O’Reilly Report (later rechristened the O’Reilly Factor ). “How did television news become so predictable and in some cases so boring?” O’Reilly asked viewers. “Few broadcasts take any chances these days and most are very politically correct. Well, we’re going to try to be different—stimulating and a bit daring, but at the same time, responsible and fair.”
    Those remarks sounded much more temperate than O’Reilly proved to be. He had a calibrated sense of rights and wrongs, and a hair-trigger temper. With O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, a forceful conservative paired with a relatively weak liberal, Alan Colmes, and Bill Shine, who oversaw the opinion hosts, the new network was defined at least in part from its earliest days by three Irish Catholics from Long Island who liked a good rumble.
    One of the most important new faces of Fox was Brit Hume. He had been a political reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and did legwork and writing for Jack Anderson’s investigative column. (The CIA had briefly put Hume under surveillance after the column featured some scoops involving the agency.) He had risen to become the chief White House correspondent for ABC News. Tall and courtly, hissuits often accompanied by a pocket square with a printed pattern complementing his ties, Hume bestowed credibility and class on the brash new network. His wife, Kim Hume, had left ABC to become Fox’s first Washington bureau chief before he arrived.
    Brit Hume was a hardworking reporter with a textured understanding of political combat and a sly appreciation for irony. He had been the one to make the considered case for the journalistic soundness of the Fox way. Most reporters and editors, he argued, approached their jobs with professionalism but could not escape a culturally liberal outlook. Reporters covered gay rights and environmental activists through this prism, Hume said, seeing parallels to the civil rights movement, and failed to subject them to the same scrutiny social and religious conservatives faced.
    â€œA very large percentage of readers and viewers out there were really insulted and found their sensibilities offended,” Hume told me some years later. “I had always had the feeling that if somebody built a broadcast network that challenged that, that there would be a tremendous market for it.” Stories not being told by the other news outlets represented “low-hanging fruit,” the kinds of pieces that could be reported evenhandedly by anyone but were not selected for broadcast or publication elsewhere.
    A push for new EPA rules might strike the Washington Post or CBS News as a story about the debate over cleaner water. Fox might frame the same story around small business owners struggling to keep pace with red tape from Washington.
    Perhaps most important, Ailes instinctively recognized good television and understood how to create it—defining “good” as something viewers would want to watch and keep watching. It was close to Murdoch’s definition of the public interest. In this case, Ailes knew that Fox’s defining feature would require a highly cultivated resentment toward other news organizations. The “fair and balanced” slogan alone was an increasingly explicit assertion that mainstream press organizationswere not fair or balanced. “We report. You decide,” provoked the same reaction in viewers and the competition. On Fox, the news programs served to get out the mission statement: the other news organizations look down on you and your beliefs. Here, you’re home.
    Fox initially had to fight to force cable system providers to carry the network. Luckily for Ailes, he had a powerful friend in the nation’s most populous metropolitan