Murdoch's World

by David Folkenflik

  The next hour, on Baier’s program, Fox News correspondent James Rosen told viewers: “Rats could attack us in the sewer and court systems if all of Cass Sunstein’s writings became law.” The relevant passage from Sunstein’s article was not quoted even in significant part to viewers. “If rats are able to suffer—and no one really doubts that they are—then their interests are relevant to the question of how, and perhaps even whether, they can be expelled from houses,” Sunstein wrote. “At the very least, people should kill rats in a way that minimizes suffering. And if possible, people should try to expel rats in a way that does not harm them at all.”

  Sunstein, the author and editor of several dozen books, is an unconventional liberal who has written provocatively about regulation but was often defended by conservative colleagues for his intellectual rigor. He was an advocate of “opt out” versus “opt in” strategies, for example, advising companies to adopt a policy that assumed employees would contribute several percent of their annual salaries to retirement funds, unless they affirmatively chose not to. Studies showed people were more likely to save money for retirement if the choice was presented as an expectation.

  Obama soon gave interviews on the same Sunday to five political talk shows, but pointedly not to Fox. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace vocally objected on air. The Obama administration, he said, was made up of “the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my thirty years in Washington.”

  IN FALL 2009, a delicate task confronted Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, the special master overseeing the American corporations that received billions of dollars in bailout money. The surge in unemployment and mortgage defaults stoked anger toward corporate chieftains who received huge compensation packages, further fueled by the taxpayer dollars funneled to their companies. Even so, a backlash was already building among many conservatives against government intervention in the private sector, though many economists backed the bailouts. Much of that fury was reflected in the comments of hosts and guests on Fox News.

  On October 22, 2009, Feinberg announced that salaries for the top executives at those seven big companies would be cut by 90 percent for the following year. Treasury public relations staffers scheduled a session to lay out the plans for reporters for newspaper and wire services in what is called a “pad and pen” session (meaning no officials would comment on tape). White House and Treasury press officials conferred over email how best to get their message out over the airwaves. At first, Treasury aide Jenni LeCompte said, the White House would invite reporters for big legacy TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, plus NPR. They’d keep it brisk: logistics allowed for eight minutes apiece. Then CNN and Bloomberg TV were added. But the bureau chiefs for the other TV networks asked, Why not Fox News?

  Unknown to them, Dag Vega, the White House director of broadcast media, had earlier emailed to LeCompte: “We’d prefer if you’d skip Fox please.” (The emails came to light only later, when obtained by a conservative legal activist group.) The administration’s move backfired. Ailes pointed out to executives at other networks that Fox shared the costs of the joint television pool for White House coverage and questioned whether it raised First Amendment questions to exclude only one outlet. The bureau chiefs not only hung together, they started talking about it to the New York Times. Other publications and sites pounced. Fox, naturally, treated the story to unrelenting coverage.

  White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki emailed a colleague: “brett [sic] baier just did a stupid piece on it—but he is a lunatic.” The next day, Psaki sent out a barbed joke to Treasury’s LeCompte: “I am putting some dead fish in the fox cubby—just cause.” Thin skin and trash talk were saved for posterity on White House email servers. As the pool of networks involved expanded, Fox’s White House correspondent was actively courted to come in to talk to Feinberg as well. Fox executed, and broadcast, as much of an interview on the subject as any of its competitors.

  Publicly, administration officials denied intentionally blocking Fox. Yet an internal email from deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest contradicted these denials, as he urged press staffers to hang tough: “We’ve demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews.” Within a day, White House officials admitted they had intentionally kept Fox away from Feinberg. And not just Feinberg: Fox should not expect Obama or top-level officials back on its airwaves anytime soon.

  “We see Fox right now as the source and the outlet for Republican Party talking points,” Anita Dunn, then the White House communications director, told me. She wasn’t simply taking issue with the big-name opinion hosts. Dunn argued the supposed wall between Fox News programs and the sprawling opinion shows had proved utterly porous. The network, she said, had decided to infuse the ideology of its opinion hosts into their news shows to deliver exactly what its audience craved. “It’s fine if that’s how they want to build their business model. We understand that. And it’s working for them and we understand that, as well. But we don’t think we need to treat them as though they are a news organization the way other news organizations here are treated.”

  Michael Clemente, Fox’s most senior hard news executive, joined Fox after decades at ABC News. He argued that other news outlets had bathed the president in a positive glow. Fox News alone asked the tough questions, Clemente said. His team would continue to do its job despite the rebuke from Obama’s White House, he said, drawing on sports for metaphors: “You know, Michael Jordan used to do the same thing. He’d yell at the refs a bunch at the beginning of the game on a simple foul . . . and it just sort of brushed [the ref] back a little bit. That’s fine.”

  THE BREAKOUT star on the news side, however, was clearly Megyn Kelly, who made a quick ascent from legal correspondent to anchor, with her good looks often blinding Fox viewers to the fact she was smart and tough.

  University of Pennsylvania students serving as Republican monitors on Election Day in November 2008 took footage with handheld digital cameras that captured Kelly’s imagination. They taped several members of the New Black Panthers swaggering outside a polling station in a heavily black part of Philadelphia.

  One of the New Black Panthers brandished a nightstick as prospective voters appeared. The video prompted coverage from the Fox News Channel and others that day. In late 2008—during the waning weeks of the Bush administration—the Justice Department filed voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party and several of its members, but charges against the group itself were dropped in May 2009. In the end, only one person was actually sanctioned.

  Then, in June 2010, former Justice Department civil rights attorney and Bush political appointee J. Christian Adams rekindled the story by suggesting that under President Obama, the department had become unwilling to prosecute blacks for civil rights violations. “As I have said under oath, this is the easiest case,” Adams told NPR’s Michel Martin. “There’s plenty of evidence that this was a violation of federal law. And don’t forget—this is also important—federal law bans the attempt to intimidate.”

  The New Black Panthers are a “distinctly anti-white, anti-gay, anti-Jewish organization,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal civil rights outfit. “Some of its leaders have said things like, ‘We ought to kill all white people, then bury them in the ground, and then dig them up and kill them again.’” Potok’s organization had been listing the New Black Panthers as a hate group for about a decade. He believed the federal investigation and the charges were warranted. But Potok also considered the November 2008 incident to be relatively minor.

  Fox’s Kelly did not. In the ensuing two weeks, she devoted forty-five segments exceeding three and one-half hours to the New Black Panthers and Adams’s allegations. Kelly also assailed others for failing to cover the story. She won fans at the network for her tough talk. Conservatives argued the episode fit a pattern in which the press sought to protect the Obama administration from embarras
sing stories. “These stories kept building, building, building in this under-media,” the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart said. “You can call it Fox News; you can call it the Breitbart sites; you can call it the Drudge Report; you can call it whatever you like—but this under-media builds up stories.”

  Still, Linda Chavez, the former staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights under former president Ronald Reagan, and Abigail Thernstrom, that commission’s Republican vice chairwoman, said the New Black Panther story was overblown. When Fox Democratic analyst Kirsten Powers disagreed with Kelly over the significance of the New Black Panther story, the anchor sought to shut her down. Kelly told Powers more than once, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and threatened three times to cut off her guest’s microphone. She would later apologize privately.

  Yet Kelly was capable of reflecting a more liberal face of Fox to the world as well. On returning from maternity leave, she invited Mike Gallagher, a conservative talk show host, onto her show to defend calling such leave “a racket.” “Now I happen to work for a nice employer that gave me paid leave,” Kelly told him. “But the United States is the only advanced country that doesn’t require paid leave. If anything, the United States is in the dark ages when it comes to maternity leave.”

  Kelly also stood up for the right of Chaz Bono—the transgender child of the musician Cher and the late singer and congressman Sonny Bono—to participate in the prime-time show Dancing with the Stars. Kelly contradicted her guest, a physician and Fox News commentator who claimed that children watching might be led astray, and she cited leading psychiatric authorities’ assertions that there was no evidence for his claims.

  In April 2010 Kelly promoted her coverage of Obama’s trip to Prague to sign a new pact with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons with this question: “Now, critics are asking: Will the new deal leave the US defenseless until it’s too late?” Her words were followed by archival footage from Fox Movietone News of a billowing atomic mushroom cloud accompanied by the rumbling sound of the explosion.

  Jay Wallace, the vice president for news at the Fox News Channel, was rueful if not contrite about the suggestion that the Obama administration’s deal could lead to a nuclear holocaust. “It wasn’t wrong,” Wallace told me, “but we failed to provide an appropriate context for the footage.” In the absence of an explicit discussion of past political rhetoric using nuclear imagery, Wallace said, the footage of the atomic blast should not have been used.

  IN OCTOBER 2010, one of Breitbart’s websites accused Shirley Sherrod, an African American regional agriculture official, of reverse racism. The website posted a video clip of her speaking before a conference organized by the NAACP about an incident that occurred years before her federal service. She spoke of her antipathy toward a white farmer and her disinclination to help him. The Obama administration swiftly fired her.

  Sherrod later told CNN that her bosses didn’t care about Breitbart. But they did care about Fox. Bill O’Reilly had already blasted her as a textbook example of black racism against whites. Sherrod said she was told she was about to be featured on Glenn Beck’s program. The administration just wanted her to go away.

  Breitbart had a policy objection to a class action lawsuit settlement for black farmers, from which Sherrod benefited. But the video clip he used, which took her down, cut Sherrod off before the redeeming resolution of her anecdote involving her later tireless advocacy for, and friendship with, that same white farmer. Fox News executives issued a new policy instructing staffers to verify every video used from an outside source, especially those with an ideological cast. One Fox News producer told me the policy was observed for little more than a week before falling into disuse.

  The Pew Research Center released a poll that year showing that 31 percent of registered Republicans wrongly believed that President Obama is a Muslim. (Time magazine released a competing poll that found that 46 percent of Republicans did.) Sixty percent of those who believed that untrue claim told Pew that they learned it “from the media.” Fully 41 percent of registered Republicans polled by CNN wrongly said the president “definitely or probably” was born outside the United States, though state records and contemporaneous newspaper birth announcements show Obama was born in Hawaii. Fox News was not the only source of such misinformation. But its tolerance for such topics kept it part of mainstream conservative conversation. For CNN, Lou Dobbs’s refusal to relinquish the subject of Obama’s birth became an irreparable breach. He found sanctuary, and a nightly show, at Fox Business in November 2010.

  8

  THE GREENING OF RUPERT

  WITH FOX NEWS, MURDOCH FINALLY had a national platform with a suitable reach in the US, though he gave Ailes great and unusual autonomy. Through a series of News Corp’s interlocking properties and their allies, Rupert Murdoch could help shape public opinion, help influence public policy, and help determine who held political power on an international scale. However, global climate change confronted the global newsman with an issue he could not avoid.

  In his native country, Murdoch’s journalistic progeny were held responsible, in some quarters, for blocking a meaningful response. In 2006 Clive Hamilton, then executive director of a liberal think tank based in the Australian capital of Canberra, identified twelve figures in public life to whom he assigned culpability for thwarting the Australian government’s movement toward a policy that acknowledged global warming concerns by curbing carbon consumption. Hamilton named Chris Mitchell, editor in chief of the nation’s most prestigious paper, Murdoch’s national daily the Australian, among his “dirty dozen.”

  “Mitchell has adopted an aggressive stance against anyone arguing that climate change is a problem,” Hamilton said, shooting noisily across the bow of News Ltd. “Not only have the opinion pages of the Australian provided unlimited space for all of the anti-greenhouse crazies but the news pages have regularly been turned over to anti-greenhouse propaganda.”

  The treatment of climate change by News Ltd properties in Australia, and, for that matter, by News Corp properties in the US, provides a case study in how Murdoch’s journalism differs from its rivals and how it shapes political discourse.

  In the early 1990s, the governing Liberal Party, the leading conservative force in the country, had called for government action to stir significant cuts in carbon consumption. By 2007, however, the Liberal Party of Prime Minister John Howard had cast its lot with the mining, coal, and other energy and resource industries, which actively opposed any such taxes. Coal was and is particularly important to the country’s economy; only one country in the world, Indonesia, exports more coal than Australia does.

  A tax was by no means the only possibility. Others suggested instead the licensing and trading of permits for emissions of greenhouse gases, much as the US had done to great effect with acid rain. Some prominent Australians, such as Bob Brown, leader of the Green Party, called for curbs in the production and export of coal from Australia’s domestic industry. Although scientists readily conceded none of the Australian proposals on its own would achieve any notable shift in global temperatures, advocates considered some such plan a vital component of any larger effort across borders. A carbon tax seemed the most effective approach to many policymakers and politicians on the political left and in the center.

  The Australian, nicknamed the Oz, presented itself as a sober-minded arbiter of political fights. But Clive Hamilton argued that the paper turned its pages over to “anti-greenhouse propaganda.” One episode stood out. On January 14, 2006, a story in the news section of the Oz written by an unnamed “special correspondent” argued that a rational approach to global warming would demand, above all else, careful deliberation.

  “The public and political debate has tended to be dominated by the convenient but highly political argument that blames industry and industrial activity for its emissions of carbon dioxide,” the article stated.

  “To add tension to complexity, some of the science supporting this
case suggests the need for relatively urgent remedial action now if serious adverse impacts are to be avoided in the immediate future, in particular rapid rises in sea levels and temperature change. . . . While recent, measured rises in temperature change are real, the cause of this change is still unproven, only assumed.”

  At the end of the article was appended the disclosure that the correspondent worked for a “resources company,” or, as Hamilton more explicitly put it, an unnamed person directly employed by an unnamed firm in the fossil fuels, such as coal or oil.

  It is an irony of Australian life and the primacy of the Murdoch family’s role there that the environmentally-minded institute led by Hamilton that criticized Rupert Murdoch’s prized creation received significant funding from the family of his younger sister, Anne Murdoch Kantor. Rupert had bought out her shares of News Corp in the 1990s along with those of his other siblings for hundreds of millions of dollars. Over time, Kantor’s branch of the family gave more than $70 million toward environmental foundations and causes. “One of the reasons we do this,” said Mark Wootton, husband to a Murdoch niece, “is because of some of the things the Murdoch papers have done.”

  Yet just a few months after Hamilton’s speech, in May 2007, Rupert Murdoch appeared to make a striking reversal. At the Beacon Theater in New York City, he addressed his nearly 50,000-strong workforce in person and by satellite and made a pledge that delighted many of his liberal critics and astonished many of his fellow conservatives.

  Murdoch cited the markedly below average rainfall in his hometown of Melbourne and drought in his native Australia. He promised his company would, on balance, emit no carbon within five years. The plan would combine energy efficiencies, the use of renewable energy sources, purchase of carbon offsets, and other strategies.