Back in 1991, when I was covering an assignment for Bloomberg, I
met a young lady at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court who
reported for the Boston Herald. We traded some notes and
info. Curious, I asked her if I could visit the Herald
newsroom. She invited me by the next week.
It looked like the place the dog threw up. It had a torn tan
carpet patched with duct tape, computer terminals and desks covered
with paper and grime, and a low stained acoustic tile ceiling with
fluorescent fixtures that made everything look even worse.
I asked the reporter what sort of editorial policy she
followed.
“At the Herald,” she replied, “we’re supposed to expose
hypocrisy in public figures wherever we find it, regardless of
politics, and rake Ted Kennedy over the coals as often as
possible.”
At Investor’s Daily (which later became Investor’s
Business Daily) in the 1980s, the newsroom, though smaller and
marginally cleaner (only because newer), looked much the same.
There, editor Steve Ludwig explained publisher William J. O’Neil’s
editorial policy to me:
“Whatever makes me money is good. Whatever loses me money is
bad.”
Compare those two editorial positions, delivered in the pungent
words of practicing reporters, to the statements of Fox News
Executive Vice President for News Tom Moody, from editorial notes
and memos Moody wrote on various subjects. The memos make up the
centerpiece of pejorative attention in the new anti-Fox film,
Outfoxed, produced by Robert Greenwald. Outfoxed,
a low-budget art-house and DVD release, has been getting outsized
media play because of its own slant, and because it was partly
funded by MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress. Howard
Kurtz wrote up the Moody quotes this way in a Sunday media column in the Washington
Post:
[Moody] wrote in March about the 9/11 commission
hearings: “This is not ‘what did he know and when did he know it’
stuff. Do not turn this into Watergate.”
In an April memo on Iraq coverage, Moody wrote: “Do not fall
into the easy trap of mourning the loss of US lives and asking out
loud why are we there?” Two days earlier, during U.S. military
operations in Fallujah, Moody said: “It won’t be long before some
people start to decry the use of ‘excessive force.’ We won’t be
among that group.”
And in a May 2003 note on President Bush’s judicial nominees,
Moody wrote that some were “being held up because of their
POSSIBLE, not demonstrated, views on one issue — abortion. This
should be a trademark issue for FNC today and in the days to
come.”
Robert Greenwald thinks this just awful. Au contraire. It’s
smart marketing, which all good news policies are — news being a
product. (“Writing on the backs of advertisements,” George Bernard
Shaw called it.) Compare Moody’s instructions to his crew to what
other news crews have actually done since the Moody memos, on every
subject he wrote about, and you find that Moody shrewdly
anticipated what every other net would cover, and how. His
instructions set Fox apart. If setting one’s network apart from all
the other networks make one conservative, that means?
Fox leads the other cable nets in the ratings. Maybe people want
something other than a new and improved version of Tide.
In addition, Moody’s notes reinforce good journalism, as
traditionally practiced: cynical, contrarian, chary of perceived
truths. My gosh. He’s speaking Truth to Power. Hasn’t Robert
Greenwald noticed?
Apparently not. Then again, Greenwald has probably not toiled in
a grimy cubicle at the Herald, where they would tell him
to forget about the Fox muckraking, go dig up something on Ted the
K. instead. Or at the old Investor’s Daily, where Steve
Ludwig would probably have told him, “Congratulations. You’ve just
figured out how Fox News makes money.”
So who’s outfoxing whom?
