At 2.30 on Wednesday morning, Washington time, the graphic on the lower right-hand corner of the screen on CNN showed Bush 249, Kerry 242. A click away, the figures on Fox News, America?s most-watched news channel, read Bush 269 (putting him ?on the cusp of victory,? in the words of its anchors), Kerry 238, a tally that had remained so frozen since midnight. Fox had done it again, given the US presidency to George W. Bush. Ohio was the key and it had totted up Ohio in the Republican column. Fox was first off the bat to add Ohio to its projections to get the figure of 269 for George Bush; CNN refused to do any such thing, insisting Ohio was ?too close to call?. Such is the sort of fuzzy maths one can end up with when politics gets in the way.
Even Rupert Murdoch doesn?t deny that the jewel in the crown of his vast media empire supports President Bush?s foreign policy ? though, of course, he insists that the channel still remains true to its slogan ?fair and balanced?. It is difficult, however, to not see Fox News as a clear-cut Republican channel, determinedly upholding the conservative cause.
Outfoxed, a recent documentary on the channel, has exposed revealing memos from top bosses of Fox News that direct the anchors and chat show hosts to pit unimpressive, inarticulate Democrats against big-draw Republican leaders. And that?s only one way that Fox tries to promote the Republican cause if even half of Outfoxed is to be believed.
Evident glee
A pre-election survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling organization, found 70 per cent of voters who said that they got most of their election news from Fox had expressed their intention to vote for President Bush, while just 21 per cent had said they planned to support John Kerry. On election night, the glee of their anchors and reporters and panelists was unmistakable.
CNN, by contrast, does not make its political allegiances so obvious. Which, to conservative opinion in America, means the same as supporting the Democrats. Either you are with them or against them. The same Pew survey found that among voters who rely on CNN for their news, 67 per cent supported Kerry and 26 per cent said they would back Bush.
Of course, both channels had non-ideological explanations for their election-night calculations. Fox?s sums showed what team Bush said hours later, that his lead was big enough to make the uncounted Ohio ballots irrelevant. CNN went to great lengths to point out why that could not be said so easily, i.e. the Democratic argument.
Bias pays
Ironically, all American channels had gone to great lengths this time to avoid precisely this sort of a controversy that had made the 2000 election such an embarrassment for the media. In 2000, all channels had first announced Gore the winner of Florida, then shifted to Bush, both incorrectly. This year, the mantra of all news networks, repeated ad infinitum, was that they would not declare a result in any state until they were absolutely certain about the outcome, no matter what others had reported. It was Fox News that had first made those erroneous calls in 2000 ? though it was happy enough later to bask in the glory of being the first to declare Bush the winner.
The partisan slant of Fox News could have nothing to do with ideology of course, but just a business model that has worked. Takers for CNN?s brand of journalism are diminishing fast. The logic of broadcast news seems to be that political bias pays. And now it will get the stamp of legitimacy that a winning side in a democratic election can claim.
