FOX Crosses the Line of No Return

April 6, 2004, I was starting a double shift at the CNN International Desk when an associate producer walked up and said, “Can we match FOX?” I had been doing Europe that day and was shifted to covering Iraq for the evening. The dayside Iraq handler was finishing up. I was reading her notes and preparing.

“Match them? What are they reporting?”

“There is some sort of battle in Ramadi.”

I had just started top-line messaging, a form of instant message in the newsroom computer system, with the manager in Baghdad, so I wrote, “Attack in Ramadi. Check it out asap, please.” He responded, “On it.”

Immediately the intern from the supervising producer's desk came over and said, “Can we match FOX?”

I asked, “Are they reporting from Baghdad?”

“I don't know.”

“Who is the reporter?”

“Brett Baier.”

“He's in the Pentagon. Baghdad is checking it out. We'll know in a minute. Get me more details of what he is reporting.” I put a note in the computer file that beeps in all editorial decision makers' computers that we were checking it out.

The intern came back and said, “He is saying it is like the Battle of Hue in the Tet Offensive.”

“Well, stay away from saying that.” Since Baghdad was checking, I decided to quickly get a story that had fed two hours earlier into edit, since the day side handler had not done it, so I called Baghdad and got the reporter, Walter Rodgers on the phone. He was explaining the elements of his story when a Vice President of CNN domestic coverage came up, and yelled across me at the dayside handler, who had given the reins to me already. I asked Rodgers to repeat himself. She yelled again, “We need to MATCH FOX!”

It was a time when FOX was starting to beat CNN in ratings. FOX had bought the billboard across the street from CNN, in Atlanta, in order to rub their faces in it. Managers were watching them more than they were paying attention to what their own reporters were saying. The next hour that April evening was one of the most humiliating experiences in my thirty years of journalism, as anchors, managers and producers pushed to be even more imaginative than those at FOX, who were out of control, obviously.

At the time some of us were asking why we were trying to match an entertainment entity posing as a news organization, yea even worse, a political machine. We didn't try to match Anna Nicole Smith's reality show or professional wrestling and they had higher ratings than either of us.

Perhaps this latest episode of race baiting, of propagandizing against the White House with iniquitous snippets of tape, taken totally out of context, indeed contrary to the context, will be the final straw to separating FOX from news. It seemed that other media did not take the bait, as did FOX. In fact FOX, over that first 20 hours of coverage of this Shirley Sherrod episode, chastised, on air, the other media for not picking it up.

Many of us who have brought in feeds of news stories know that you need to watch the entire feed to be able to determine the whole story.

When The American Taliban, John Walker Lindh video came into CNN, for instance, I watched the whole feed and put a hold on it until senior managers could come to the desk. The reason was that early in the interview, done by a freelance reporter/cameraman, Lindh was asked whether he was in pain. He responded, “No they gave me morphine.”

Well, any good journalist knows that anything a person says on morphine, or alcohol for that matter, is suspect, unless of course the story is about their inebriation. A decision has to be made about whether the story is important enough to override concerns about the person's mental state.

On another story, a young reporter said on air that nerve agent had been found by the 101st Airborne in Iraq and that “some was in a bunker behind the facility.” Upon watching the entire feed, the Lieutenant Colonel interviewed clearly stated that we were looking at pesticide for local orchards and that some was in a slit trench with a piece of sheet metal over it. Not a bunker. Yes, pesticide IS nerve agent, but in the context of looking for weapons of mass destruction, “nerve agent” and “bunker” were the wrong words and therefore we changed the story.

These are daily considerations within news organizations. The fact that the non-FOX media seemed to have held back on the Sherrod story seems on the surface to be a good sign that they are not following FOX off the cliff, but I suspect that there were other motives internally; motives of not wanting to give FOX the satisfaction, perhaps. I say this because if a manager in the news room at the other networks had looked at the entire tape of Sherrod's story, surely they would have done more than back off from the story, they would have broadcast that the out of context clips were a lie.

They at least got her on the phone and on camera, where she was quickly able to reveal the lies of FOX and then the media obtained the entire tape. At least that is the timeline as far as I can determine.

Too bad the White House, whose staff were calling Sherrod and asking her to resign before Glenn Beck came on the air, The NAACP, who summarily condemned Sherrod even though they had the raw tape, and the Ag Department, who took credit for her firing, didn't bother to do their homework.

I hope she sues all of the above and lives a very comfortable life.