Imagine covering Fox News for a living

For some of us, keeping an eye on Fox News’ partisan and unprofessional antics is a habit of morbid curiosity. For the great folks at Media Matters, monitoring Fox News is part of an ambitious drive to bring some accountability to modern journalism. But imagine being a media reporter for a legitimate news outlet, and trying to cover Fox News objectively. That has to difficult.

The NYT’s David Carr is a media columnist, and has to cover the Republican network as part of his duties. He explained today what that’s like to even consider writing about Fox News in a fascinating item.

Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to. And if all that stuff doesn’t slow me down and I actually end up writing something, there might be a large hangover: Phone calls full of rebuke for a dependent clause in the third to the last paragraph, a ritual spanking in the blogs with anonymous quotes that sound very familiar, and — if I really hit the jackpot — the specter of my ungainly headshot appearing on one of Fox News’s shows along with some stern copy about what an idiot I am. […] Media reporting about other media’s approach to producing media is pretty confusing business to begin with. Feelings, which are always raw for people who make their mistakes in public, will be bruised. But that does not fully explain the scorched earth between Fox News and those who cover it.

To hear Carr tell it, Fox News operates under a well-coordinated, omerta-like code, where “media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them.” (Carr noted, “Earlier this year, a colleague of mine said, he was writing a story about CNN’s gains in the ratings and was told on deadline by a Fox News public relations executive that if he persisted, ‘they’ would go after him. Within a day, ‘they’ did, smearing him around the blogs, he said.”)

We’re talking about what is ostensibly a news network, not an organized crime family.



The point of Carr’s piece, however, wasn’t necessarily about Fox News’ heavy-handed operations, but rather, to raise an interesting observation about the consequences of its defensiveness.

Fox News’s amazing coup d’etat in the cable news war has very likely been undercovered because the organization is such a handful to deal with. Fox is so busy playing defense — mentioning it in the same story as CNN can be a high crime — that its business and journalism accomplishments don’t get traction and the cable station never seems to attain the legitimacy it so clearly craves. There have been few stories about Bill O’Reilly’s softer side (I’m sure he has one), and while Shepard Smith’s amazing reporting in New Orleans got some play, he was not cast as one of the journalistic heroes of the disaster. The fact that Roger Ailes has won both Obie awards and Emmys does not come up a lot, nor does the fact that he donated a significant chunk of money to upgrade the student newsroom at Ohio University, his alma mater. Instead, Mr. Ailes and Brian Lewis, his longtime head of public relations, act as if every organization that covers them is a potential threat and, in the process, have probably made it far more likely. And as the cable news race has tightened, because CNN has gained ground during a big election year, Fox News has become more prone to lashing out. Fun is fun, but it is getting uglier by the day out there.

The notion of “Fox News” and “journalism accomplishments” appearing in the same sentence strikes me as inherently odd, in part because I’m hard pressed to remember the last time the news network broke a story of consequence.

Nevertheless, while I find Carr’s point compelling, I also find the whole dynamic confusing. Fox News wants to be taken seriously as a professional, journalistic outlet. So, when a reporter at another outlet starts taking a look at the network, Fox News freaks out, starts making threats, and panics at the notion of being treated unfairly, further undercutting its reputation.

But if Fox News has an inferiority complex, why not — and I’m just throwing this out there — start trying journalism for a change? Perhaps, instead of simply being an extension of the Republican National Committee, Fox News could use its resources to become a cable news channel?

But, no, it wants to stick with the ridicule style that’s brought them ratings success and it wants to punish journalists who notice.

Mr. Lewis said that members of his staff were not in the business of altering photos, that they had no control over stories that appeared on “Fox and Friends” or other shows, and he pointed out that it makes their job harder when they go after reporters. He called my suggestion that there was something anti-Semitic about the depiction of Mr. Steinberg “vile and untrue.” Mr. Lewis denied that his staff had threatened one of my colleagues or planted private information about him on blogs. That comes as a surprise to reporters I talked to who say they have received e-mail messages from Fox News public relations staff that contained doctored photos, anonymous quotes and nasty items about competitors. And two former Fox employees said that they had participated in precisely those kinds of activities but had signed confidentiality agreements and could not say so on the record.

What a sad, strange place.