The LA Times has picked up the Fox Memo story (which we linked to on Thursday) and with a pretty good wrap right here (click for full article – well worth it – some excerpts below).
A veteran producer this week alleged that Fox News executives issue a daily memorandum to staff on news coverage to bend the network's reporting into conformity with management's political views, refocusing attention on the partisan bias of America's most watched cable news operation.
[Cue Claude Raines saying “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling in here” – Casablanca, 1942]
The charges by Charlie Reina, 55, whose six-year tenure at Fox ended April 9, first surfaced Wednesday in a letter he posted on an influential Web site (www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45) maintained by Jim Romenesko for the Poynter Institute, an organization that promotes journalistic education and ethics.
Concerns about Fox, which styles its news coverage as "fair and balanced," begin with its owner, Australian-born Rupert Murdoch. The corporate boards and family investors who control most of the American news media generally feel obliged to maintain a wall of separation between news and editorial opinion. Murdoch, by contrast, operates in the style of the traditional Fleet Street proprietors, who dismiss such distinctions as inconvenient fictions.
And as a deeply conservative man, he is willing to put his money where his politics are: Murdoch, a naturalized U.S. citizen, subsidizes publication of the Weekly Standard, one of the country's most influential right-wing journals. According to a forthcoming book by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, he loses as much as $40 million a year maintaining the New York Post as an outlet of conservatism in Manhattan.
As Fox's founding president, he hired Roger Ailes, a shrewd Republican political operative who earned a well-founded reputation for bare-knuckle campaigning while working for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As one of the architects of the elder George Bush's media strategy in his campaign for president against Democratic rival Michael Dukakis, Ailes helped devise the notorious Willie Horton commercials. As he told Time magazine in August 1988, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."
The late Lee Atwater, another Bush aide, described Ailes as having "two speeds — attack and destroy." Before joining Fox, where he serves now as chairman, Ailes produced Rush Limbaugh's short-lived television talk show.…
Reina, who told The Times he left Fox in a dispute over salary and workload — not politics — hardly comes across as a knee-jerk liberal. He is at pains, for example, to say that he believes his former employer's cable rivals — CNN and MSNBC — also air news reports riven with bias on both ends of the political spectrum. At Fox, he not only produced the network's weekly media criticism show, "News-Watch," but also a series of specials on Newt Gingrich and a talk show with conservative religious commentator Cal Thomas.
Still, Reina, whose 30-year career includes stints at the Associated Press, ABC News and CBS, said Fox's ideological problems begin with Ailes.…
Av Westin, a longtime ABC news executive who is now executive director of the National Television Academy, examined Reina's letter and said: "Nothing about this surprises me. The uniform smirks and body language that are apparent in Fox's reports throughout the day reflect an operation that is quite tightly controlled. The fact that young and inexperienced producers acquiesce to that control by pulling stories is further evidence that nonjournalistic forces are at work in that newsroom.
"Roger runs the place with an iron hand and he was put in place there by Murdoch, who selected him for his politics. In that sense, what's happened at Fox is a carry-over from all Murdoch's print publications, where the publisher's politics and editorial preference is reflected in the news hole to an extent that isn't true anywhere else in American journalism."
Below is the actual letter:
From CHARLIE REINA: So Chris Wallace says Fox News Channel really is fair and balanced. Well, I guess that settles it. We can all go home now. I mean, so what if Wallace's salary as Fox's newest big-name anchor ends with a whole lot of zeroes? So what if he hasn't spent a day in the FNC newsroom yet?
My advice to the pundits: If you really want to know about bias at Fox, talk to the grunts who work there - the desk assistants, tape editors, writers, researchers and assorted producers who have to deal with it every day. Ask enough of them what goes on, promise them anonymity, and you'll get the real story.
The fact is, daily life at FNC is all about management politics. I say this having served six years there - as producer of the media criticism show, News Watch, as a writer/producer of specials and (for the last year of my stay) as a newsroom copy editor. Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox - including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America - did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")
Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.
Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.
But the roots of FNC's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it. The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. But along with the obvious - information on who is where and what they'll be covering - there have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors' copy. For instance, from the March 20th memo: "There is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan's remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are 'with the Iraqi people.' One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought." Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only "food for thought," but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General's remarks as "utterly incomprehensible"?
The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox's newsroom personnel into action - or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be "whining" about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent's report on the day's fighting - simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.
These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management's politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management's point of view, and, in case they're not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them.
Also, if you’re interested read some of the letters this has generated here. Some are pretty good, but you’ll have to pick and choose.
Here’s one that corroborates The Memo allegation:
From DAVID COHEN: The daily Fox News Channel coverage memo exists. I saw one once while visiting a friend who works there. It was different from memos I've seen at other news organizations. At the other news organizations, I've seen notes on coverage and providing direction on things like, "don't ignore this element," or "lead with reaction" on stories where there has been little or no movement in a period of time.
In a 24/7 news operation assembled by a couple of hundred people, the memo serves a useful function in ensuring consistency of numbers, pronunciation and other facts. Very helpful when wires and other sources disagree. The Fox memo was the only one I've seen that suggested a political line.
One of the arguments put forth by those critical of most news
organizations and detailed in Bernie Goldberg's book BIAS, was that
they had an institutional bias and were populated with like-thinking
individuals. Charlie Reina's exposure of the FNC daily memo simply
shows that it has its own institutional bias and seeks to ensure that
everyone who works there gets the message.
If I worked at Fox, I'd admit the memo's presence. But in doing so,
Fox would then admit that its detractors are correct -- that fair and
balanced is nothing more than a slogan, the "tastes great, less filling" of the news business.
1:55:21 PM 
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