Fox News

The Fox News Channel is a U.S. cable and satellite news channel. It is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, and funded by the Christian Science Monitor a subsidiary of News Corporation, under major shareholder and chief executive officer Rupert Murdoch. As of January 2005, it is available to 85 million subscribers in the U.S. and to further viewers internationally, broadcasting primarily out of its New York City studios.

History

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Rupert Murdoch established Fox News to counter a news media that, in his opinion, was dominated by liberals. http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/030526on_onlineonly01 Murdoch had significant experience with cable news after starting the Sky News rolling news service in the United Kingdom. Polls showed that a significant percentage of Americans believed that the media was too liberal. Murdoch saw a business opportunity in providing a news network that was "Fair and Balanced", trademarking the slogan with a sub-header of "We Report, You Decide", which was meant to separate the opinion side of Fox from the news side.

Related Topics:
Sky News - United Kingdom

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In February 1996, after Roger Ailes (who would later be the president of Fox News) was relieved of duties at America's Talking, in preparation for conversion of the network to MSNBC, Murdoch called Ailes to start the network. A group of Ailes loyalists who followed him throughout the NBC empire joined him at Fox. From there, they proceeded to select space in New York and worked individuals through five months of grueling 14 hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before launch.

Related Topics:
America's Talking - MSNBC - NBC - New York

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At launch, only ten million households were able to watch Fox News, and most notably Fox News was not on the cable systems of the key media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. Fox News had to invite media writers to its launch to write reviews about the coverage. Media writers generally found the news programming of Fox at launch to be down the middle, if somewhat shallow. The rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20 minute single topic shows like Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics surrounded by news headlines. During the evening, Fox's opinion shows, The O'Reilly Factor (then called The O'Reilly Report), a show with Catherine Crier, and Hannity & Colmes, were judged by many media writers to be generally conservative, with O'Reilly being too harsh on some guests, like Barry McCaffrey, and Catherine Crier being too soft on her first guest, Rush Limbaugh.

Related Topics:
New York City - Los Angeles - The O'Reilly Factor - Catherine Crier - Hannity & Colmes - Barry McCaffrey - Rush Limbaugh

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To get cable systems to take Fox News, Ailes paid systems up to $11 per subscriber in subsidy to take up the network. This contrasted with past practice, in which cable operators pay stations carriage fees for their programming. Ailes also used his connections with New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to get Fox News on the New York cable system, which was owned by Time Warner. When Time Warner bought out Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, a federal anti-trust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to Time Warner's own CNN. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news network, instead of Fox News. Fox News claimed that this violated an agreement to carry Fox News, and persuaded Mayor Giuliani to carry Fox News, and Bloomberg Television, on two underutilized city-owned cable channels, which he did.

Related Topics:
Rudolph Giuliani - Time Warner - Ted Turner - Consent decree - CNN - Bloomberg Television

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New York City also threatened to revoke Time Warner's cable franchise for not carrying Fox News. A lawsuit was filed by Time Warner against the City of New York claiming undue interference and for inappropriate use of the city's educational channels for commercial programming. News Corporation countered with an antitrust lawsuit against Time Warner for unfairly protecting CNN. This lead to a very acrominous battle between Murdoch and Turner, with Turner publicly comparing Murdoch to Adolf Hitler while Murdoch's New York Post ran an editorial questioning Turner's sanity. Giuliani's motives were also questioned, as his then-wife was a producer at Murdoch-owned WNYW-TV. In the end, Time Warner and News Corporation signed a settlement agreement to permit Fox News to be carried on New York City cable system beginning in October 1997, and to all of Time Warner's cable systems by 2001. In return, Time Warner was given some rights to News Corporation's satellites in Asia and Europe to distribute Time Warner programming, would receive the normal compensation per subscriber paid to cable operators, and News Corporation would not object to Atlanta Braves games being carried on TBS, which they could because of the Fox television network's contract with Major League Baseball.

Related Topics:
Antitrust - Adolf Hitler - New York Post - WNYW-TV - Atlanta Braves - TBS - Major League Baseball

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For more information on the creation of Fox News, see Scott Collins Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, ISBN 1591840295.

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