"I don't think there's ever been anything like it," Brit Hume declares with undisguised enthusiasm. He's talking about the Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch's fledgling, all-news cable network, a competitor to CNN and MSNBC launched October 6, 1996 with an estimated sticker price of $475 million and now available in 25 million U.S. homes. As the network's managing editor and chief Washington correspondent, Hume is FNC's highest profile figure -- twenty-three years a reporter for ABC News, eight years as its chief White House correspondent, an Emmy winner in 1991 for his gulf war coverage. In a promotional announcement aired often on FNC, Hume tells viewers: "The intention here is to do a broadcast people can trust."

 "Trust." "Fairness and balance." "We report, you decide." Those terms punctuate FNC's broadcast day like a drumbeat, along with viewer mail flashed on the screen: "We are thrilled with the unbiased and fair coverage." "Thank you for finally providing a TV home for me." "Until Fox News Channel, I was about to give up on news." "It's nice to have a newsperson say, 'You can draw your own conclusions.'" "TV news magazines have fluff. Fox has facts." "Fox News Channel has boldly earned the right to declare they are fair and balanced." "Finally, objective journalism . . . . You're long overdue." "Thank you for putting together a team that tells the whole story."

 For Murdoch, playing the FNC chip is a huge gamble. CNN, in its eighteenth year, is a pillar on the international news scene, and a cash cow for its owner, Time Warner -- the world's biggest media conglomerate. MSNBC is the privileged offspring of behemoth parents, GE and Microsoft. Those two cable networks were duking it out vigorously for a share of the relatively small all-news audience -- with CNN comfortably the world champ -- when FNC entered the ring as a brash challenger. It's looking at losses for the two years 1997 and 1998 of $150 million, and won't be operationally solvent (say its proprietors) until sometime in 2000, with years to go beyond that before News Corp. recoups its investment.

Nonetheless, it's a briar patch that Murdoch, 68, was eager to leap into. He needed news as the final piece of his three-legged stool to be truly a major player in American television, like ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although hugely successful in entertainment (The X-Files, The Simpsons) and sports (National Football League games) via his Fox broadcasting network, the Australian-born magnate never was a presence in national TV news in the U.S., and his affiliated stations were a rag-tag crew of mostly UHF outlets with little history of local news coverage. Now, the recently-forged Fox News division, under Murdoch's chosen instrument for progress, Roger Ailes, 56, is busily trying to change all that by building a national TV news organization and a chain of news-conscious local stations that can play on the same ball field with the big kids.

Having thus committed to a cable news network, the question for Murdoch became: What kind of network? What would be its taste and texture? How would it differ from the entrenched dynamic duo, CNN and MSNBC? The answer emerged from Murdoch's conviction that most TV journalists are far more liberal than the population as a whole.

 There is some evidence that he is correct. In a 1996 Freedom Forum/Roper Center survey of 139 Washington-based newspeople, 61 percent of the sample professed to being either "liberal" or "liberal to moderate," and a paltry 9 percent "conservative" or "moderate to conservative." In 1992, Bill Clinton got 89 percent of their votes, George Bush 7 percent. In a famous Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in February 1996, CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg hurled a hand grenade at his colleagues, saying: "The old argument that the networks and other 'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore." Even Walter Cronkite declared last year that most journalists "are probably tilted toward the liberal side."

Enter Murdoch, stage right. In February 1996, he installed as chairman and c.e.o. of the Fox News division the tough, profane political consultant and TV producer, Ailes, who'd advised a string of Republican office-seekers: Nixon, Reagan, Bush, New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Ailes had been a central figure in Joe McGinniss's celebrated book about the 1968 Nixon campaign, The Selling of the President, which depicted Ailes as a ranting, blustery partisan whose showbiz talents cut to the core of Nixon's image problems. (Famous Ailes quote from the book: " . . . a lot of people think Nixon is dull . . . a bore, a pain in the ass . . . . He's a funny looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying 'I want to be President.'")

Ailes went on to help create syndicated entertainments like A Current Affair, The Maury Povich Show, The Leeza Show, Tom Snyder's Tomorrow: Coast to Coast, and Rush Limbaugh's TV chat program. He was president of CNBC, which he turned into a profitable business news channel, but was less successful with America's Talking, NBC's attempt to build an all-talk cable network.

 When NBC junked America's Talking to use that channel space for MSNBC, Ailes was a fifth wheel and resigned -- not happy with his treatment. A few days later, Murdoch made him boss of Fox News, which now includes FNC; Fox News Sunday, a weekend news-and-features series on the Fox broadcast network; and a service called News Edge that feeds video news to Fox broadcasting affiliates around the country. Only 89 of 175 of those stations do local news, but Murdoch has decreed that all Fox stations must eventually have news departments as a condition of their affiliation with the network, and to make them regular suppliers to FNC of news that breaks in their locales.

 Ailes's proudest hire was Brit Hume, 54, well-known among TV news people for his staunch conservative views. Then he nabbed Catherine Crier, 43, unarguably the most glamorous Republican judge ever elected in Texas, a Michelle Pfeiffer with political and journalistic savvy; she served five years presiding over the 162nd District Court in Dallas before jumping into journalism at CNN, and then to ABC where she was a correspondent on World News Tonight and a regular substitute anchor for Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel. Another big fish was the solidly authoritative Neil Cavuto, who transplanted his CNBC Wall Street Market Wrap program to FNC where it became The Cavuto Business Report. Bill O'Reilly, twice an Emmy winner for local TV news coverage, had anchored the tabloidy Inside Edition syndicated series and then got himself a master's degree in public policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard ("It was like going from Bangladesh to Beverly Hills."). For FNC he created The O'Reilly Report, a fast-paced nightly hour of features and chat.

 Ailes also reeled in Tony Snow, a conservative syndicated columnist and chief speechwriter for President Bush; Fred Barnes, executive editor of the conservative, Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, best known as a member of The McLaughlin Group; Eric Breindel, former editorial page editor of Murdoch's right-wing New York Post, now a senior vice-president of News Corp. and host of a weekly media critique show on FNC called Fox News Watch; and, for a weekend interview show, Judith Regan, who runs her own imprint at Murdoch's HarperCollins. (She published Howard Stern's Private Parts.) A pair of radio talk show hosts named Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes were drafted to front a putative left-right dialogue cum interview show that massages issues in the news.

While rounding up that cast of onscreen characters, Ailes simultaneously set about creating the infrastructure for a full-service cable news network, opening bureaus in Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Moscow, and London, along with a half-dozen in the U.S. He made deals for video news pictures with Reuters, World Television News, and AP-TV; enlisted Sky-TV, Murdoch's pan-European satellite news service; and arranged exchanges with News Corp. newspapers around the world.

The questions persist: Can a news network with executives and on-screen talent so conspicuously and so heavily right of center fulfill a promise of delivering "fair and balanced" news, information, and opinion? Does the oft-repeated slogan "We report. You decide" accurately describe how the network delivers news? In FNC's round-the-clock format -- unlike those of its competitors at CNN and MSNBC -- hard news, except for breaking stories, is mostly confined to a few minutes on the hour and half-hour, plus an hour-long newscast at 7 p.m. Most of the rest is chat shows, interviews -- discussions of trends, technology, health, entertainment, education, pets, as well as some old newsreels from the Fox Movietone archives.

 A close monitoring of the channel over several weeks indicates that the news segments tend to be straightforward, with little hint of political subtext except for stories the news editors feel the "mainstream" press has either downplayed or ignored. Nobody, least of all FNC, downplayed the allegations surrounding President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

 Quick off the mark on January 21, the day the story broke, FNC had the first photo of Lewinsky on the air at 9 a.m., and, that same day, the first interview with Gennifer Flowers. It began devoting all of its daytime schedule to the crisis, except for brief segments on other news, along with weekend specials attracting hundreds of viewer phone calls. The network even inaugurated a whole new early-evening series, Special Report with Brit Hume, to keep daily tabs on the evolving story "for the duration of the developments." Staffers from bureaus around the country were rushed in to reinforce the Washington team. "I've been proudest of our restraint," says FNC v.p. John Moody.

Another Clinton story -- unrelated to the alleged sex scandal -- got the full FNC treatment because, according to Brit Hume, nobody else was doing it. On January 7, the FNC dinner hour news program introduced a report saying: "Hillary Clinton and the White House broke the rules. But the taxpayer may end up paying the bill." The story described a $286,000 sanction imposed by a federal judge against the administration for a "coverup" (in the judge's words) of efforts to keep the proceedings of Hillary Clinton's 1993 health care task force a secret. The White House had been shifty in responding to a legal request for the records, the FNC story suggested; interviewees were adamant that taxpayers ought not get stuck with paying the fine.

If Fox's collective news hole -- small for an all-news cable channel -- offers largely untilted coverage, its discussion programs regularly and unabashedly convey a right-of-center sensibility, sometimes subtle, at other times overt. In a promo for the Hannity & Colmes show, Sean Hannity declared his view that "a liberal is somebody who thinks he has a right to my hard-earned money." Bill McCuddy, the entertainment reporter, once announced: "Janet Reno -- if you dressed her in drag, how could you tell?"

 A talk show guest, Tim Graham of the Washington-based Media Research Center, declared it "outrageous" that the indictments of two Clinton cabinet members received only "eight or nine seconds of network airtime," and that "so many Clinton scandals don't get sufficiently covered." The host, Eric Burns, wondered if that was because "the media are so liberally biased." Graham answered that if one compares Clinton's coverage to Ronald Reagan's, it's "hard to conclude that there isn't a liberal bias here." He added: "Clearly you can say there's a liberal bias when you've got CNN's president staying in the Lincoln bedroom and nobody seems to care at CNN."

On a recent Catherine Crier program, Oliver North inveighed -- largely unchallenged -- against a laundry list of Clinton's perceived depredations, including what he called "cemeterygate" -- the burial in Arlington National Cemetery of Clinton donor Larry Lawrence, who had wrongfully claimed wartime service in the Merchant Marine. North was pleased that Lawrence had been "repotted in San Diego where he belongs." Later on the same program, Republican Congressman Bill Paxon enjoyed a lengthy, friendly hearing of what the House leadership is up to in advancing its own proposals and dealing with Clinton's. The hour thus contained no "balance" to unalloyed right-wing views.

 Asked about it, Crier called that edition of the show "one of those accidents of booking. After the fact, I said, 'This is not good.'" Still, it would be okay to have several conservatives on the same program, she suggested, "as long as I'm challenging them and not just providing a forum."

On a Hannity & Colmes segment, former FBI special agent Gary Aldrich defended his book Unlimited Access, which purports, among other things, to detail personal improprieties by Clinton -- some of which Aldrich himself had declared "hypothetical." The segment was framed as a debate over whether FBI, CIA, and Secret Service agents ought to have the right to report alleged improper behavior by presidents -- only Kennedy and Clinton were mentioned -- when it might affect national security. But the segment's main effect was merely to ventilate the rumors about Kennedy's and Clinton's private activities.

 On another Hannity & Colmes program, Christopher Ruddy, a writer for the right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (founded by conservative mogul Richard Mellon Scaife), retailed his theory that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown died of a gunshot wound to the head before his plane crashed in Croatia in 1996. Unfounded speculation had it that scandals related to Brown somehow threatened the White House, and that he was murdered aloft before the plane and its 35 passengers died in the crash. (The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology insists Brown's head wounds resulted from the crash.) Ruddy said that "people working on behalf of the White House don't want this to come out." Hannity defended Ruddy, and Fox contributor Ellen Ratner challenged him, but the effect (perhaps even the intended effect) was to leave hanging in the air the suggestion that the White House might be involved in a criminal conspiracy.

Such random gleanings from FNC programming can't be representative of the schedule as a whole, but the attentive viewer, over time, inevitably detects in the welter of talk, banter, chat, debate, repartee, raillery, and badinage an unmistakable conservative biosphere, and a tendency to launch dialogue from right-of-center assumptions that need sorting out before discourse can begin. And although you're far more likely to encounter conservative panelists like columnist Cal Thomas, Washington Times writer Liz Trotta, Weekly Standard staffer Tucker Carlson, right-wing humorist P. J. O'Rourke, and Nixon confidante Monica Crowley, you'll also spot a few notables from the left like Democratic speechwriter Robert Shrum and former White House lawyer John Quinn, as well a handful of undefinables from the vague center like McLaughlin Group veteran Morton Kondracke and Washington Post staffer Juan Williams. Only two well-branded and confessed liberals have a regular weekly spot on the schedule: Jeff Cohen and Laura Flanders of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), who alternate in the assigned leftie chair on Eric Breindel's News Watch series, which also includes a bonafide rightie (often John O'Sullivan of the National Review) and a putative centrist like the Los Angeles Times's Jane Hall. (A recent topic for Media Watch debate: Do "radical environmentalists," as Breindel called them, receive too-friendly treatment in the liberal media?) Important administration officials do show up on FNC regularly and receive respectful treatment.

 But the issue persists: Can a news network dominated by conservative hosts be genuinely "fair and balanced"? Would "fairness and balance" require hiring identifiable left-of-center figures as hosts to assure ideological equipoise? No, say FNC's overseers. The left already has a giant megaphone at all the other cable and broadcast networks.

 As the only network news boss whose political colors are plainly visible, Ailes has proved an irresistible target for sharpshooters on the liberal parapets. "What would Roger Ailes say if James Carville was anointed president of CBS News?" inquired Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz in a celebrated 1997 New York magazine article about Ailes and FNC by David Brock. But even some of his harshest critics declare Ailes "charming," "engaging," and even "cuddly, like a Saint Bernard." He had a warmup for his current job when the Colorado brewer Joseph Coors hired him in 1974 as news director (Ailes then had no TV news experience) of Television News, Inc., which sent local stations a conservative-tinted brew of national news.

Ailes says he "makes no apology for trying to be fair and objective and reaching out to points of view that the mainstream media probably will ignore." But does that require that all the hosts of FNC talk shows be right of center? "How many conservatives do they have over at NBC?" Ailes counters. You need only watch their news, he says, to conclude that they're liberal. "Do you think there's any doubt about where Peter Jennings stands? Dan Rather? I don't. Everybody who claims they're totally unbiased is full of crap. The issue is how much of what they believe creeps into their news. We work very hard bending over backward to present more than one point of view."

 That includes stories on the environment. Many reporters think "environmentalism is always good and anyone who opposes any measure related to it is always bad," says Ailes. "We don't necessarily agree with that." Being leery of environmentalists is the right-of-center, pro-business position, it is suggested to him. "But we're just as critical of business when they're doing something wrong," Ailes responds. (No fewer than eighty-two staffers from CNBC and America's Talking jumped ship and followed him to FNC, Ailes claims. When NBC complained about his recruiting their employees, Ailes says he told them: "You guys ought to know the difference between recruitment and a fucking jailbreak. They're coming down the bedsheets over there, and you better try to stop them.")

 Brit Hume is even more vocal in defending FNC's ideological tone. "Surveys repeatedly and unfailingly show," he says, that most viewers believe television news is biased, but most journalists insist the public is wrong. "Our view is that the public is onto something, and that there are a lot of people out there whose sensibilities are continually offended by what they see on the other news networks." FNC does not "pander to the right," he insists, even though a lot of conservatives might flock to the network if it did so. Some of them are "furious," he claims, because FNC hasn't done more on the alleged Ron Brown murder and the supposed White House plot to cover it up. "We're not going to endorse that conclusion the way a lot of right-wing people want us to, but it's a story that's worth giving airtime to." But is it really worth airtime, since independent medical authorities who examined x-rays of Brown's skull say the theory is nonsense? Opposing voices have been presented "sharply criticizing Christopher ddy's work," says Hume. "We have a fair number of liberals who get on."

And how many right-wing journalists do the other networks employ, Hume wonders. "If you look at the number of conservatives in broadcasting altogether, there are almost none! There are an awful lot of people who would not admit they are liberals. But they are. They really are! Is there a single conservative on the air at NBC News? A single one at CBS? At ABC you've got George Will and Bill Kristol and that's about it."

Eric Breindel's portfolio extends to loftier stuff than merely moderating a panel show. As a close adviser to Rupert Murdoch on strategic planning, Breindel is distinctive in the News Corp. culture: Harvard (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, chairman of the Harvard Crimson), London School of Economics, Harvard Law, aide to New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Rupert Murdoch feels strongly, says Breindel, that there's a pattern of bias in broadcast and cable TV news, "so much so that the people who run these channels aren't aware that they're governed by a bias. It is to them, for example, wholly natural that global warming be reported as a fact, not a controversy." Murdoch also feels, says Breindel that the political and fund-raising scandals of the Clinton administration haven't gotten nearly the play they would have "were the occupant of the White House a Republican, a rightist, a Richard Nixon, Gerry Ford, or Ronald Reagan. Part of fairness is not letting your politics decide what you do and don't cover."

Fred Barnes, an FNC analyst and host, feels the network isn't as conservative as it has a right to be. The way to balance the news, he says, is to offer coverage "that's quite candidly conservative" as a useful counterpoint to "the more liberal tendencies of the other networks." But Kim Hume (wife of Brit), FNC's Washington bureau chief, argues that top Administration figures would boycott a self-branded, overtly conservative network. (Mike McCurry, Sandy Berger, Donna Shalala, Rahm Emanuel, Lanny Davis, and others have been interviewed on the network.) Yes, a lot of Republicans show up on FNC, Hume admits, but they control the Congress. "There are news organizations so unused to Republicans running anything," she says, "that if Senator Orrin Hatch holds a news conference, they say, 'Oh, he's a right-wing nut. We're not going to cover him.' If Ted Kennedy holds one, they cover it. We don't look at it that way."

Media critics and theorists around the country have been casting a curious eye on FNC to see how Murdoch's first foray onto the national TV news scene is evolving. Ben Bagdikian, former journalism dean at Berkeley, charges that the slogan "We report. You decide" translates to mean: "We decide what news you hear, and you make up your mind based on what we tell you." Murdoch "has never been known for giving balanced news in his newspapers or broadcasts," says Bagdikian. "If he has had a religious experience, we have yet to see the results."

 Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, says he's "leery of" and "uncomfortable" with any news operation that makes a point of political allegiance of any sort. Robert W. McChesney, associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that "sometimes there's pretty good stuff" on FNC, but hard, digging, investigative reporting takes a back seat to the endless chat shows, and even though those programs sometimes feature left-of-center views, "that's not journalism. It's talking heads about the news." The slogan "We report. You decide" is "ludicrous," says McChesney, since they decide what to report.

 The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz says FNC's reporting is "reasonably straightforward," but "it certainly would have been unthinkable even a decade ago for so obvious a partisan as Roger Ailes to be incarnated as a network news chief." Still, says Kurtz, we should "judge him more on the product than on his resume." Reese Schonfeld, former (and founding) president of CNN, thinks FNC is "too much talk and too little action. Too much commentary about the news and too little news." And it's too predictable, he adds. "You know it's going to be the right-wing approach to everything."

Some of FNC's severest critics are former employees, and of those interviewed by cjr, practically none would speak for attribution. Several complained of "management sticking their fingers" in the writing and editing of stories and of attempting to cook the facts to make a story more palatable to right-of-center tastes. ("I've worked at a lot of news organizations and never found that kind of manipulation.") Another detects "hypocrisy" in FNC's failing to note during coverage of Princess Diana's death that Murdoch tabloids around the world had bought paparazzi photos of her. Yet another declared baldly it was a "tyrannical and horrible" place to work, something "I wanted to wipe off my shoe."

 A few ex-staffers are more temperate. Mike Schneider was anchor of the network's main nightly newscast at 7 p.m. and recalls Ailes as a "very talented manager, and in many ways a visionary." But he may have underestimated the cost and commitment needed to produce a successful news channel, Schneider says. "They still have an incredible amount of potential over there." On his own broadcast, says Schneider, "I never saw or felt the hand of Murdoch's ideology. I never had any pressure to do a story I didn't feel comfortable with."

 Critics and supporters tend to agree that a high point of FNC's history so far was its wall-to-wall coverage last year of the Senate's campaign finance hearings, when the other networks gave it shorter shrift. A few cynics suggest, however, that FNC aired saturation coverage of the sessions as yet another opportunity to put the Clinton administration's alleged malefactions on national display. James Ledbetter, media reporter of The Village Voice, claims he detected a pattern in the coverage: "Whenever a Democratic senator began asking a question, they cut away to a commercial, so you got this remarkably one-sided view of what was going on. They did that repeatedly. It was so consistent it was funny."

 No matter such criticisms, Wall Street has a generally sanguine view of FNC's chances for success in the long term. Murdoch is a risk-taker -- "the greatest entrepreneur of the second half of this century," says Reese Schonfeld. Most experts in 1986 felt there was no room for a fourth broadcast network when Murdoch launched Fox -- they were famously wrong -- and a good case could be made that there's insufficient viewer appetite or need for three all-news cable networks. But Murdoch turned the arithmetic of the cable industry on its head when he offered to pay cable operators ten dollars per subscriber per year (for a limited period) to carry FNC -- a daring tactic to get the channel off and running. Up to that time, cable owners customarily had paid cable networks for programming. Derek Baine, an analyst at Paul Kagan Assoc. Inc., points out that cable networks need a critical mass of about 30 million subscribers before advertisers show up in force -- which means an outlay for News Corp. of $300 million just to y circulation, plus the normal budget for covering the news. Says Baine: "Murdoch has always been willing to spend a lot of money to get what he wants. Look at his purchase of NFL games. But, if ten years from now, FNC is a mainstream network, he could have a four billion dollar asset, and this thing will look like a hell of a deal."

 Meanwhile, FNC's 25 million subscriber base (projected by Ailes to be 40 million by 2000) trails MSNBC's 38 million and CNN's 73 million, but the actual tuned-in audience for each are tiny fractions of those numbers except when there's a gulf war, an O.J. Simpson trial, or explosive revelations about alleged sexual misbehavior in the White House. FNC's twenty-four-hour average audience, for example, on the day the Lewinsky story broke was 159,000, or five times its normal viewership.

 Quantity issues at FNC are yoked to those of quality -- to the inherent character of the network. Murdoch concluded years ago that he needed a national TV news organization and a web of TV stations able to cover local news -- a simulacrum of what ABC, CBS, and NBC have -- as the final jigsaw puzzle piece of his global news service, with all the synergy, influence, and ad revenue that such a service promises. He chose to create an all-news cable channel as the fundament of that design. But publicly branding it (and its related daily supply of newsfeeds to stations) as "conservative" would have been unfeasible for two reasons: a large chunk of the potential audience would avoid it; and some Fox affiliates, whose owners may not share Murdoch's conservative views, would object.

 But nobody can object to a "fair and balanced" news service, nor one that simply "reports" and lets you "decide." Those terms have become a marketing device and a fig leaf for Fox staffers who are otherwise perfectly candid (as they were in interviews for this article) about their right-of-center convictions. But the same yardstick must apply to them as they demand from their competitors: keeping the hard news pristinely free of ideology.

Is the output of Fox News Channel, in its totality, truly "fair" and "balanced"? The answer is a qualified no. It's no more fair and balanced than the National Review or The Nation, which flaunt no such claims. In its patchwork quilt of talk shows, FNC is, inevitably, the product of its creators, interlocutors, and guests. That makes it unmistakably a bully pulpit for conservative sentiment in America -- and, consequently, robustly controversial, which, for better or worse, expands the boundaries of our national discourse. It's one more stone in what's becoming an avalanche of news and opinion hurtling at the public. But the antidote to controversial speech, as is regularly pointed out in journalistic circles, is more controversial speech -- not less.

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