By Robert P. Laurence
Union-TribunePublished: 10/27/2006
Excerpt:
... Fox News is part of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's
News Corp. empire, but the man who runs it is Roger Ailes, formerly a
media consultant to Republican candidates. (Fox officials declined to
be interviewed for this story.)
The channel "has the same kind of audience (as
talk radio). It has the same kind of heat," said Gladstone. "It's also
very inexpensive. By filling the air with the same kind of passion, and
cutting back on the field reporting, they could save money and
encourage audiences to tune in longer."
To keep viewers watching, she added, "They never
changed the subject. Something all of cable news has done, not just Fox
alone, is to go with a continuing story, no matter how insignificant,
such as a car chase on Ventura Boulevard, in order to keep people
tuning for the next chapter."
Ailes also wanted a channel that would "bring an
alternative point of view, saying pretty specifically, an alternative
to what he saw as the overly liberal traditional networks," said Robert
M. Steele, Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values, at Florida's
Poynter Institute, a school for journalists.
