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The FOX News Channel is a 24-hour news channel launched in 1996 on United States cable and satellite networks as well as in syndication. It is available to 80 million subscribers in the U.S. and broadcasts primarily out of its studios in New York City.
Launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers, the nascent network quickly rose to prominence in the late 1990s as it started taking market share away from the Cable News Network (CNN). It has since surpassed CNN to become the number one news channel in the United States.
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Every hour from 9AM to 3PM Eastern Time, the FOX News Channel broadcasts Fox News Live providing a wide-ranging assortment of hard news, guest analysts, and interviews. In primetime, the network presents a slew of personality-driven news-talk shows such as Special Report With Brit Hume, hosted by political reporter Brit Hume from Washington, D.C.. The network bills The Fox Report With Shepard Smith as the signature evening newscast, offering various reports on the day's events hosted by Shepard Smith. The network's top-rated show is The O'Reilly Factor, hosted by the opinionated journalist Bill O'Reilly. In addition, conservative Sean Hannity and liberal Alan Colmes, both radio talk show hosts, debate political issues of the day on Hannity and Colmes.
The network syndicates Fox News Sunday hosted by Chris Wallace (Journalist) to Fox Network affiliates across the United States. From time to time, FOX News also produces a newsmagazine show for its Fox affiliates called The Pulse.
The channel is now available internationally, but unlike CNN's international service it tends to concentrate on domestic issues which might be seen as less newsworthy outside North America.
Like the rest of FOX, it is owned by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. It is a sister channel to Sky News, which is based in the United Kingdom.
The CEO, Chairman, and President of FOX News is Roger Ailes. After he began his career in broadcasting, Ailes started Ailes Communications, Inc and was successful as a political strategist for Presidents Nixon and Reagan and in producing campaign TV commercials for Republican political candidates. His work for former President Richard M. Nixon was chronicled in the book The Selling of the President: 1968 by Joe McGinniss.
Ailes withdrew from consulting and returned to broadcasting in 1992. He Ailes ran the CNBC channel and America's Talking, the forerunner of MSNBC for NBC. More recently, Ailes was named Broadcaster of the Year by Broadcast and Cable Magazine in 2003.
Several FOX News anchors have conservative backgrounds. Managing editor and host Brit Hume is a contributor to the conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard. Daytime anchor David Asman previously worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Manhattan Institute, a conservative thinktank. Former Fox News Sunday host Tony Snow is a conservative columnist, radio host, and former chief speechwriter for the first Bush administration. This perceived bias led to Snow's replacement by Chris Wallace in 2004.
FOX asserts that it is less biased and more factual than other American networks, using promotional statements such as "fair and balanced" and "we report, you decide". Their commentators argue that other news channels are dominated by a liberal bias.
Meanwhile, critics contend that it is FOX who is biased. Pointing to examples of allegedly unfair presentation, the large number of conservative staffers, and leaked memos, these critics paint a picture of an avowedly-partisan news organization that spins stories to the right while publicly claiming to be "fair and balanced". Others point to New Yorker article Vox Fox where Ailes makes it very clear that the network was conceived as a platform for conservative opinion.
Much of this confusion can be attributed to the divide between the straight-news programming and news analysis programming of FOX News. It is the straight news which FOX News promotes as "Fair and Balanced," but the very concept of the channel - one that has led to its dominance in the news ratings - has always been to provide strong, opinionated and controversial news analysis in Prime Time. Much of the left-leaning analysis of FOX News that finds a bias centers on the news analysis programs such as Special Report with Brit Hume, The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes, which FOX has never claimed to be either fair or balanced. In fact, it is the strong opinions on these commentary shows that has largely led to FOX's overwhelming success.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning media watchdog group, released a report titled Fox: The Most Biased Name in News. Some highlights: A study of guests on the network's signature political show, Special Report with Brit Hume, found that 89% were Republicans, 65% were conservatives, 91% were male, and 93% were white. By comparison, on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports only 57% of the guests were Republican and 32% were conservatives. And since 1998, one out of every 12 episodes of The O'Reilly Factor has featured a segment on Jesse Jackson (usually with themes like "How personal are African-Americans taking the moral failures of Reverend Jesse Jackson?").
A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (sponsored by Ford, Carnegie, Tides, and other left-leaning foundations) found that viewers of Fox News were more likely to hold misconceptions than viewers of any other network. Eighty percent of Fox News viewers believed at least one of three misconceptions about the War in Iraq, more than any other radio or television news source. This behavior persists even after adjusting for viewership and political preference. The report also claims that the viewers who watched the news more carefully turned out to have more misconceptions. The misconceptions included whether evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq link had been found, whether weapons of mass destruction had been discovered in Iraq, and whether Europe had supported the US's decision to go to war without UN support. [1]
However, it is possible that people watch Fox News because they have these false impressions, not the other way around. (See post hoc ergo propter hoc.)
In addition, FOX News has been accused of placing an undue emphasis on conservative news stories. Critics claim that the network sometimes dedicates whole segments and shows to conservative stories they feel have been downplayed, and for a time had an entire show, Only On Fox, dedicated to doing just that.
A report in the Los Angeles Times on November 1, 2003, quoted Charlie Reina, a self-described liberal and Fox News producer for six years, saying that Fox News executives require the network's on-air anchors and reporters to cover news stories from a right-wing viewpoint and distributed a daily memo explaining what stories they wanted highlighted and what spin to place on others. A Fox spokesman called Reina's remarks the "rantings of a disgruntled former employee".
FOX and their supporters maintain that FOX is only perceived as being 'right of center' only because they are not 'left of center', as they claim the rest of the media is. They point to programs such as Hannity and Colmes as an example of the network's balance. On that program, Sean Hannity, a conservative radio talk-show host debates Alan Colmes. Although some claim he is liberal, Colmes was a self described moderate in 1995, prior to the creation of the Fox News Channel ("I'm quite moderate," he told a USA Today reporter; Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, page 84). On the other hand, in recent times, Colmes proudly claims to be a liberal, which can be seen by watching him on television or listening to his radio show "The Alan Colmes Show" or by watching him on Hannity and Colmes, where he often criticizes those who use the word "liberal" as a bad word (especially in the context of Presidential candidates). Colmes authored "Red, White & Liberal: How Left Is Right & Right Is Wrong" in 2003.
Meanwhile, another prominent FOX program, the O'Reilly Factor, hosted by Bill O'Reilly, is also cited as a program with a heavily conservative slant, a charge O'Reilly denies, preferring to call himself a populist. Sister station Sky News carries a similar format show hosted by Sun newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn.
"In case you're counting, that's two hard-core conservatives (Brit Hume and Fred Barnes) and two centrists (Mort Kondrake and Mara Liasson). Imagine a game of political seesaw, with two people sitting on one end, and two others sitting in the middle. See how balance works on Special Report with Brit Hume?" - Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
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