Crazy like a fox
Fox news is out to save its ailing Web site by borrowing -- literally and politically -- from its resurgent news channel. Even if it means rewriting a few stories.

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By Sean Elder

May 25, 2000 | On May 16, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. sponsored a "new media workshop" in downtown Manhattan.

After a projected image of unofficial corporate mascot Homer Simpson ("Doh!") brought cheers from the suits in attendance, News Digital president Jon Richmond took the podium to tout the company's Web presence in the U.S. FoxSports.com and Fox.com, he said, have become popular destinations. Nobody disagreed.

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But when Richmond brought up Foxnews.com, and News Corp.'s plans to complement it with local Fox TV affiliates, the crowd was silent.

The news channel has a site?

Meanwhile, just a few blocks uptown at News Corp. HQ, there can be heard another sound: The whooshing noise of Foxnews.com employees printing out their résumés. The all-news site has always been a revolving door: Its dismal Web ratings (it finished a distant sixth place to industry leader MSNBC.com in February and March) and slightly dysfunctional management style have made it a way station for online journalists for years. But an on-high decision to remake the site in the image of the more successful Fox News Channel seems to be roiling the waters.

Why are employees jumping ship? This looks to be one heavy-handed makeover.

"The channel has sent people in," said one staff member who chose to remain anonymous. "There's been a deliberate shift toward a more conservative point of view. They've been going around saying they want us to be more 'fair and balanced' -- which to them means more of a focus on conservative values."

Anyone familiar with the Fox News Channel knows that its outlook -- and most of its commentators -- are unabashedly conservative, and much of its programming is devoted to talk rather than hard news. But under the guidance of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, that focus on politics and personalities has proven to be a winner. After years of struggling, the network now enjoys parity with its competitors, MSNBC and CNN. Murdoch would clearly like to see some of that mojo transplanted to the moribund news site.

Ailes, a former media advisor to presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush, has made his mark on other networks as well. It is he we have to thank for programs such as "A Current Affair" and "The Maury Povich Show"; while at CNBC and NBC's all-argument experiment "America's Talking," he brought Chris Matthews to the world and pumped life into Geraldo Rivera (the John Travolta of prime time news). Now at Fox News he has done the same thing, making stars of conservative commentators like Bill O'Reilly and ABC-defector Brit Hume. (Between disasters, Ailes has noted, news watchers need something to return to.) And he has provided a safe haven to the channel-surfing conservatives of our country -- free from what they consider the liberal mewlings of CNN, NBC, ABC et al. -- under the banner: "We Report, You Decide."

Some close to Foxnews.com say Ailes has now taken an interest in influencing online content.

Laura Durkin, News Digital Media's senior vice president, says the push toward a "convergence" between the channel and the site is only logical. "The idea for the News Corporation is to have one Fox News effort that joins together all the news rooms all over the country here and across the U.S.," she says. "There's no point in us doing things twice."

She also discounts tales of employee dissatisfaction and downplays the departures, chalking them up to the peripatetic nature of new media. "The pressures of the market here in New York are such that there is turnover," she says. "We've actually been very stable."

At least one new face can be found preaching the gospel of convergence. The Foxnews.com team now reports to new executive editor Scott Norvell, a veteran of the Fox News Channel, who was recently on assignment in London. "Laura and Mr. Ailes brought me over here because we're spending a lot of time and money producing a lot of content at the news channel that -- because of the nature of television -- quickly disappears into the ether and doesn't get used again," he says.

"I hate to use the word 'convergence,'" he adds. "It's one of those buzzwords that makes me insane. My job here is from a procedural point of view to figure out a way to make it work. It wasn't happening naturally."

In early meetings with site staff, Norvell spelled out his mission -- and the direction the site would need to go. "My first goal was to make sure that a lot of the stories getting up on the channel are getting up on the Web site. That basically means taking a television script and repurposing it for the Web."

Repurposing TV scripts is not why some of the journalists at Foxnews.com got into this business ("That meeting caused a lot of people to start looking for jobs," according to one staffer), but it may be no worse than rewriting wire stories from AP and Reuters to brand them as "Fox News." They call the process "foxify," and according to one former staffer, it can play hell with a story. "Things would get rewritten so many times the final piece would be incoherent."

Worse, some reporters say they have been encouraged to rewrite controversial stories -- especially those dealing with gun control, abortion and homosexuality -- to better reflect the prevailing opinions found on the channel. Both Durkin and Norvell deny a conservative mandate.

"The news that we put up is not going to change," insists Norvell. "The personality sites [pages devoted to Fox News TV talent] will reflect the personalities of the people on the air. The personalities of the O'Reillys of the world are self-evident."

A casual visitor to the site might be more frustrated by the technology than any alarmist politics presented. Searches don't work, pop-up windows don't scroll, the Java script on the front page seems to seep through every application (at least on my laptop). "There are sirens going off all over the place here about trying to fix some back-end problems we've had for a long time," says Norvell.

While political bias often seems evident -- Rep. Rick Lazio, R-N.Y., was touted as "Hillary's Nightmare" and the story of the Arkansas supreme court's recommendation that President Clinton be disbarred featured a photo of Bill grinning like a jackal from behind the presidential podium. Still, it's no more (or less) overt than a Murdoch publication like the New York Post. Which, says editor of rival MSNBC.com Merrill Brown, is precisely the point.

"There's no question about the fact that they have a different take on stories; there's no question that they book guests and hire hosts [on the channel] with a different kind of balance than I believe, as a journalist, is appropriate for objective journalism," says Brown. "I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with their unwillingness to admit what they're doing."

Some of the friction over at the news site may be the result of typical New York journalists -- moderate to liberal in their politics, a mix of races and genders, gay and straight -- accepting what they perceive as a conservative influx. Some of it may be old-fashioned employee burnout at a company known for its occasionally swashbuckling managerial style. Either way, the exodus shows no sign of slackening. There were so many people leaving for a while that departing employees were asked not to tell co-workers they were going: They simply disappeared. One ex-staffer asked me if I'd heard of the "cake budget."

"There were so many people leaving for a while that people who were favored got a big cake," she says. "And the people they didn't like would either get no cake or a little cake, and you could only have a couple of people come and say goodbye. The question became, 'What kind of cake am I gonna get?'"

And in the end, isn't that what we all want to know? The problems of a few small people don't amount to a hill of beans in the making of global multimedia empire. (To borrow another line from "Casablanca," at least one old Fox hand I spoke to said she was "shocked, shocked" to learn there was any conservative opinion mongering afoot.)

In a larger context, the changes at Foxnews.com might simply be seen as good business sense -- and another attempt by Murdoch to get his hands around the Web. I worked for Murdoch in 1995, on an aborted joint venture between News Corp. and MCI called the iGuide. That experiment was too chaotic to be conservative; no one knew what to do with this thing, let alone what ideology it should have.

But the boss's prejudices were made manifest. I assembled a bulletin board of sorts during the United Nation's Women's Congress in Beijing that year, a collection of opinions from feminists and politicians. On the top of the page was one written by Sen. Edward Kennedy (or someone on his staff) -- and I arrived one morning to find it was gone. Murdoch was on the premises, I was told, and he hated Kennedy. Rather than risk offending him, the pesky Ted was removed. (And Rupert probably wishes it were that easy in real life.)

Though some think Murdoch blew it with the iGuide (the project was scrapped when MCI pulled out), News Corp. may be in an even better position to tackle the Internet now. According to Norvell, Murdoch has invested 250 million pounds to building Sky television's Internet efforts in the U.K., and Wall Street loves him. And he has never been one to let ideology slow him down; the Village Voice remained largely unchanged under his ownership, and lord knows, Matt Groening is no Republican ("Doh!").

If a conservative tilt has worked on cable, maybe it will make it on the Web. "Caveat emptor," says Columbia Journalism Review editor at large Neil Hickey. "The more the merrier. The antidote to controversial speech is more controversial speech, not less."

salon.com | May 25, 2000

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