Fox News Channel

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Template:Infobox Network The Fox News Channel is a highly rated American cable and satellite news channel. It is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, and is a subsidiary of News Corporation, under major shareholder and chief executive officer Rupert Murdoch. As of January 2005, it is available to 85 million subscribers in the U.S. and to further viewers internationally, broadcasting primarily out of its New York City studios.

The network was launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers. The network slowly rose to prominence in the late 1990s as it started chipping away at the ratings of competitor CNN. As of 2005, Fox News's long-term viewer ratings exceed those of competing news channels (Nielsen's Points ratings) while CNN outnumbers Fox News in terms of numbers of individual viewers (Nielsen's Cume ratings).

Contents

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History

Image:IraqWarCoverage-FNC.jpg Rupert Murdoch established Fox News to counter a news media that he believed was predominantly liberal.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Murdoch had significant experience with cable news after starting the Sky News rolling news service in the United Kingdom.

In February 1996, after Roger Ailes (who would later become the president of Fox News) was relieved of duties at America's Talking, in preparation for conversion of the network to MSNBC, Murdoch called Ailes to start the network. A group of Ailes loyalists who followed him throughout the NBC empire joined him at Fox. From there, the CNBC expatriates, who joined a team already in place at Fox News, created the programming concept and proceeded to select space in New York. Ailes, often agitated and verbally abusive, worked individuals through five months of grueling 14-hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before launch, on October 7, 1996.

At launch, only ten million households were able to watch Fox News, with none in the major media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. According to published reports, many media reviewers had to watch the first day's programming at Fox News studios because it was not readily available. The rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20-minute single topic shows like Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics surrounded by news headlines. Interviews had various interesting facts at the bottom of the screen about the topic or the guest. The flagship newscast at the time was called The Schenider Report, with Mike Schneider giving a fast paced delivery of the news. During the evening, Fox had opinion shows: The O'Reilly Factor (then called The O'Reilly Report), The Crier Report hosted by Catherine Crier, and Hannity & Colmes. From the beginning, FNC has also had a number of different slogans it included in daily broadcasts including: "America's Newsroom", "The Most Powerful Name in News", "FOX Means Business", "Fair and Balanced", and "We Report, You Decide"

Image:Foxnewsalert.pngFrom the beginning, Fox News has had a heavy emphasis on the visual presentation of news. Graphics were designed to be colorful and attention grabbing, and to allow people to get the main points of what was being said even if they couldn't hear the host, through the use of on-screen text summarizing the position of the interviewer or speaker, and "bullet points" when a host was giving commentary.

The network at times differentiates commentary from news with a constant graphic reading "COMMENTARY" during features such as Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo. This gives the impression that the rest of the program is objective journalism. Fox News is very clear that Opinion Driven programs like the O'Reilly Factor and Fox and Friends are not news programs, and are not held to the journalistic standard of objectivity at any time during the broadcast of those programs.

Fox News also created the Fox News Alert, which interrupted regular programming when a breaking news story occurred. Each News Alert was designed to be attention catching with a swooshing graphic filling the screen and a piercing chime instead of the regular news music. At the beginning of FNC, the Fox News Alert was used fairly rarely, giving the chime more cachet, but currently it is used regularly to announce scheduled events or repeat existing news instead of only breaking news stories, with Fox News Alerts sometimes several times each hour instead of just a few times a day.

Fox News was also the first network to put up the American flag after the September 11, 2001 attacks, a feature in the upper left hand corner that has persisted to this day.

To accelerate the adoption by cable companies, Fox News paid systems up to $11 per subscriber to distribute the network. This contrasted with the normal practice, in which cable operators pay stations carriage fees for the programming of channels. When Time Warner bought out Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, a federal antitrust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to Time Warner's own CNN. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news network, instead of Fox News. Fox News claimed that this violated an agreement to carry Fox News, and Ailes used his connections to persuade Mayor Giuliani to carry Fox News and Bloomberg Television on two underutilized city-owned cable channels, which he did.

New York City also threatened to revoke Time Warner's cable franchise for not carrying Fox News.

A lawsuit was filed by Time Warner against the City of New York claiming undue interference and for inappropriate use of the city's educational channels for commercial programming. News Corporation countered with an antitrust lawsuit against Time Warner for unfairly protecting CNN. This led to an acrominous battle between Murdoch and Turner, with Turner publicly comparing Murdoch to Adolf Hitler while Murdoch's New York Post ran an editorial questioning Turner's sanity. Giuliani's motives were also questioned, as his then-wife was a producer at Murdoch-owned WNYW-TV. In the end, Time Warner and News Corporation signed a settlement agreement to permit Fox News to be carried on New York City cable system beginning in October 1997, and to all of Time Warner's cable systems by 2001, though Time Warner still does not carry Fox News in all areas<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>. In return, Time Warner was given some rights to News Corporation's satellites in Asia and Europe to distribute Time Warner programming, would receive the normal compensation per subscriber paid to cable operators, and News Corporation would not object to Atlanta Braves baseball games being carried on TBS (which normally would not happen because of the Fox television network's contract with Major League Baseball).

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Management

The CEO, Chairman, and President of Fox News is Roger Ailes. After he began his career in broadcasting, Ailes started Ailes Communications, Inc and was successful as a political strategist for Presidents Nixon and Reagan and in producing campaign TV commercials (the Willie Horton ad is a notable example) for Republican political candidates. His work for former President Richard M. Nixon was chronicled in the book The Selling of the President: 1968 by Joe McGinniss. Ailes withdrew from consulting and returned to broadcasting in 1992, including Rush Limbaugh's television program during 1992-1996. He ran the CNBC channel and America's Talking, the forerunner of MSNBC for NBC. More recently, Ailes was named Broadcaster of the Year by Broadcast and Cable Magazine in 2003.

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Fox News Channel Programming

Fox News presents a wide variety of programming, with up to 15 hours of live programming per day. Most of the programs are broadcast from Fox News headquarters in New York City with its street-side studios on Sixth Avenue (1211 Avenue of the Americas) in the west extension of Rockefeller Center.

The following is the usual weekday lineup (as of March, 2006, all times Eastern):

In addition to the regular weekday programming, FNC also has weekend programming including Fox & Friends Weekend, The Cost of Freedom business block, Weekend Live with Tony Snow (Saturday), Weekend Live with Brian Wilson (Sunday), Fox News Live with Jamie Colby, Studio B Weekend with Trace Gallagher, The Big Story Weekend with Julie Banderas, The Beltway Boys, Fox News Watch, The Fox Report with Trace Gallagher, War Stories with Oliver North, Heartland with John Kasich, The Lineup, The Big Story Primetime, The Journal Editorial Report, and various Fox News Specials.

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Fox Network Programming

Fox News also produced several newsmagazine shows for its Fox network affiliates including Fox Files and The Pulse, although both were cancelled after short runs due to poor ratings.

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace currently airs on many Fox affiliates and is similar in format to other Sunday morning political discussion programs, and is rebroadcast on FNC at 6 p.m. ET Sundays. The Fox network does air Fox News's live coverage of events such as the State of the Union Address. However, the live event coverage on the Fox network is different than Fox News Channel's live event coverage. Fox News also produces national news segments to air on the local Fox affiliate's news programs.

There are rumors that Fox News will start an evening newscast and/or a morning news programs for the Fox Network. It is unknown when will these possible shows materialize. However, Fox News and the Fox broadcast network is thought by news insiders to be using its new syndicated newsmagazine Geraldo at Large (which airs in prime slots on all of Fox's O&Os) as a test run of rolling out a national newscast. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is now also chairman of the Fox Television Stations division, and has been pushing for the network's O&O stations to have a more uniform image and presentation in their newscasts.

Fox News is confirmed to produce a program called On Scene (focusing on crime-related stories) on Fox's soon to be launched sister network, My Network TV, also under Roger Ailes's control.

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Fox News Website

Image:Ads foxnews com.gif Fox News also boasts a website with a range of political columnists and webblogs. Fox News entertainment correspondent Mike Straka and Italian-American priest Jonathan Morris maintain their own weekly blogs. Columnists include a swath of political conservatives and one Democrat.

Conservatives/Republicans:

Liberals/Democrats:

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Fox News Radio

Image:Ads foxnews radio.gif In 2003, Fox News began syndicating one minute radio updates to radio stations. On June 1, 2005, Fox News Radio expanded to a full service news operation, employing sixty people and providing five minute newscasts at the top of the hour and one minute newscast at the bottom of the hour. Fox News Radio is hosted by both FNC television personalities and others working solely for radio. At launch, sixty stations participated in the network, with more joining under a deal struck between Fox and Clear Channel Communications converting many Clear Channel stations to carry Fox News Radio newscasts and allow Fox News Radio to use news content produced by Clear Channel and distribute it nationally.

An audio simulcast of the channel is played on XM Satellite Radio channel 121 and Sirius Satellite Radio channel 131. Fox also produces Fox News Talk for both satellite radio services, with talk radio programs syndicated by and featuring Fox News personalities.

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Fox News Channel personalities on radio

Fox News Radio also syndicates radio programs hosted by its TV personalities.

Two other radio programs hosted by Fox News Channel personalities are distributed by other companies. The Radio Factor hosted by Bill O'Reilly is syndicated separately by CBS-owned Westwood One (the show began in 2002); however, satellite rights are held by Fox News Talk. The talk radio program hosted by FNC's Sean Hannity is syndicated by ABC Radio (show started in 2001). Both were grandfathered, as their shows began before Fox News Radio begun.

Aside from Hannity, the Fox News Channel radio hosts also appear on the Fox News Talk satellite radio channel, along with the satellite-only program Fox Across America hosted by Spencer Hughes. Hannity's program appears on the ABC News & Talk satellite channel.

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Personalities

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Regular guests & contributors

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Former personalities

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Ratings

Fox News currently leads the cable news market, earning higher points ratings than its chief competitors CNN and MSNBC combined by average viewership. Measured by unique viewers, however, CNN achieves 11% higher ratings than Fox News. Many commentators attribute this to Fox's somewhat longer duration "talk" programs interspersed with news updates which cause viewers to tune in for longer periods as compared to CNN's generally shorter news segments. Others claim that Fox News garners more loyal fans than CNN, MSNBC, and others due to being the sole network to appeal to conservatives by openly rejecting the supposed bias of the "mainstream liberal media".

The BBC reported that Fox News saw its profits double during the Iraq conflict, due in part to what the report called patriotic coverage of the war. By some reports, at the height of the conflict they enjoyed as much as a 300% increase in viewership, averaging 3.3 million viewers daily <ref>Template:Cite web</ref>. In the Introduction written in 2004 to the new edition of her 2002 book, New Nuclear Danger (publisher: New Press), the Nobel Prize nominee and author Dr. Helen Caldicot claims on page xvi of that 2004 Introduction that Rupert Murdoch, owner of FOX News, has in the past helped with "[p]reprations for the second U.S. Iraq invasion (the first invasion had taken place in 1991) [which] were started in 1992 by a small group of 'defense intellectuals'... [who] began to publish a series of letters in The Weekly Standard [also owned by Murdoch] calling for another U.S. invation of Iraq, as well as advocating support of Israel's campaign against the Palestinians and warning about the rising power of China."

In 2004, the perceived gain in ratings began to become more apparent. Fox News' coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Boston ranked higher than that of its two closest cable competitors combined. In September, Fox News Channel's ratings for its broadcast of the Republican National Convention beat those of all three broadcast networks. During President Bush's address, Fox News notched 7.3 million viewers nationally, while NBC, CBS, and ABC scored ratings of 5.9, 5.0, and 5.1, respectively.

In April 2005, however, CNN sent out a press release stating that Fox's viewership of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 had dropped over a period of six months since the peak of the November 2004 elections (to a total drop of over 58% [1], [2]). Fox still held eight of the ten most-watched nightly cable news shows, with The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes coming in first and second places, respectively. Since then Fox's ratings have surged. [3]

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Controversies and allegations of bias

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Since its conception, the controversial network has been among one of the most heavily criticised media outlets associated with claims of an intentional design and delivery of a content with a bias supporting neo-conservative/Republican Party opinion for ratings, profit and political impact; all while representing itself as a "fair and balanced" objective news outlet.

One controversial element of the Fox model is the channel's opinion segments, which are included in the vast majority of its daily cablecast. At the closing of most shows, the host takes approximately one to two minutes to give his or her personal take on the day's events, and while this is not unheard of in the cable news world, critics claim Fox's lineup includes a disproportionate amount of such commentary. Fox News and its on-air commentators explain that they are by intentional design not bound to the journalistic standard of objectivity at any time during these programs as they are opinion-driven programs , except when they introduce a Fox News update or report segment.

Opinion-driven programming includes most of the channel's ratings-heavy prime-time schedule and the Fox and Friends morning program. While this morning program is very clear when it transitions to and returns from objective news segments hosted by Lauren Green, its entertaining trio of hosts make no attempt to be ojective when discussing the days politicized stories, often interjecting commentary on news stories as Lauren Green ends her objective news report. The network, however, markets with claims of neutrality in reporting, while most personalities working for Fox News claim it to be the most objective news channel in the United States.

Fox News has rejected all allegations of bias and adopted the slogans "We Report, You Decide" , "Fair & Balanced" and "Real Journalism".

The most commonly cited example of a bias is Bill O'Reilly, the former host of Inside Edition. He claims his show is a "no-spin zone" and he is neutral; yet according to the independent Pew Research Center, O'Reilly's viewership is almost as heavily conservative-leaning as that of Rush Limbaugh.[4]

Fox News conservative commentator Tony Snow was mentioned as a potential frontrunner candidate for White House Spokesperson in 2006. This was discussed in political and business commentary as a too obvious connection to the Republican administration, despite Snow being a former speech writer for former president George H. W. Bush. The White House also expressed interested in the communications job for Dan Senor, the former spokesman for the United States in Iraq who is now a Republican consultant and Fox News analyst.

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Trademark disputes

In the late 1990s, as Fox News reached most major cable markets, a handful of observers began to use world wide web to mock FNC's putative bias, triggering the first publicly aired trademark disputes between Fox News and its critics. In late 2001, Faux News Channel.com created the "Faux" Fox News logo[5].

In 2003, Penguin Books published Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by the liberal comedian and writer Al Franken. The book criticized many conservative individuals and institutions on grounds of inaccuracy; it included Fox News among the media outlets described as biased. Before the book was released, Fox brought a lawsuit, alleging that the book's subtitle violated Fox's trademark in the promotional phrase "Fair and Balanced". On that basis, Fox moved for a preliminary injunction to block the publication of the book. The United States District Court Judge hearing the case denied the motion, characterizing Fox's claim as "wholly without merit, both factually and legally". Fox then withdrew the suit.

In December 2003, the Independent Media Institute brought a petition before the United States Patent and Trademark Office seeking the cancellation of Fox's trademark in the phrase "Fair & Balanced" for being deceptively misdescriptive.[6] After losing early procedural motions, the IMI withdrew its petition and the USPTO dismissed the case.[7]

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International transmission

The channel is now available internationally, though its world programming is the same as its American programming, unlike CNN International, which airs regional programming that is largely independent of its U.S. broadcasts.

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United Kingdom

Fox News is also carried in the United Kingdom with global weather forecasts instead of most advertisements, by the British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) satellite television network, in which News Corporation holds a 38 percent stake. It is a sister channel to BSkyB's Sky News, which is more popular in the region. Fox News is usually broadcast as a VideoGuard encrypted channel but during major news stories it may be simulcasted on Sky News Active, which is free to air. A fault in certain Pace Micro Sky Digibox receivers, notably the DS-430N which was Sky's default issue for some years, has left them able to decrypt the channel with no active subscription card since March 1, 2006; although no reason is known as to why.

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Canada

On December 14, 2000, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved Fox News Canada on behalf of the Global Television Network, for broadcast in Canada. Fox News Canada was to be a domestic Canadian version of Fox News. [8] The channel, or specialty television service, was never implemented by Fox, and the deadline for commencement of the service expired on November 24, 2004. That same day, a similar licence was granted to Rogers Communications for "MSNBC Canada", which went to air in September, 2001. During this period, it was stated by supporters of Fox News that the station was being "banned in Canada," when in fact, the opposite was the case. The CRTC's previous refusal to grant Fox News an outright license had been contested by some Canadians, as well as American fans of the channel, who believed the decision to be politically motivated. However, it is rare for any American cable network to be licensed in Canada, especially when there is a Canadian alternative.

On November 18, 2004 the CRTC announced that a digital license would be granted to Fox News ([9]). In its proposal, Fox News stated, with reference to Fox News Canada, that "Fox News does not intend to implement this service and therefore will not meet the extended deadline to commence operations" [10]. On December 16, 2004, Rogers Communications became the first Canadian cable or satellite provider to broadcast Fox News, with other companies following suit within the next several weeks.

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Australia

In Australia Fox News Channel is broadcast on the three major Pay-TV providers, Austar, Optus Television and Foxtel. Foxtel is 25% owned by News Corporation. The Australian syndication previously featured some local programming, including a John Laws current affairs programme in place of "Fox & Friends". Currently, it is a direct feed of the US broadcast.

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Brazil

Since 2002 Fox News has been broadcast to Brazil, but the commercials are replaced with weather forecasts (except for their own ads). It is broadcast by Sky Brazil (satellite operator, a joint-venture between News Corporation and Globopar) and in the digital packages of NET (cable television operator, a joint-venture between Telmex and Globopar).

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New Zealand

In New Zealand, Fox News is broadcast on the Prime terrestrial network's nightime period. Because of the late time zones in the U.S., Fox News only gets to broadcast their late night programming, notably "Fox and Friends." Local advertisements and weather maps replace U.S. advertising. The weather map temperatures are, of course, presented in degrees Celsius.

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Other countries

Fox News Channel is also carried in more than 40 countries including Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Cambodia, Cayman, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, Grenada, Germany, Guam, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Macau, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Peru, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Saint Kitts, Saint Lucia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tonga and Venezuela. (Service to Japan stopped in the summer of 2003 it can be seen at Americable (Distributor for American Bases http://americablejapan.com, Mediatti (Kadena Air Base) http://www.mccokinawa.com/cable and Pan Global TV Japan http://www.panglobaltvjapan.com/.)

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References

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  1. Template:Cite book
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External links

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Unofficial pages

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