CURRENTS
Fox Watch
MoveOn.org members take bias-watching into their living rooms
Every week, 700 people who don’t like Fox News tune in to Fox News. Some are retirees with e-mail addresses like “greatestgramma.” Others are busy with their day jobs as piano teachers and special-education tutors. They have experience in management or cancer research but little, if any, background in the new field they have undertaken: media criticism.
They are members of MoveOn.org and they have volunteered for the Fox Watch detail. Everyone in the group has agreed to monitor at least one show on the 24-hour cable news service, but many monitor upwards of five. From Utah to Florida, they TiVo, videotape, and transcribe. Some find themselves yelling at their television sets, others have been asked by their families to watch in a remote corner of the house. They are looking to identify incidences of media malpractice, and several volunteers give as many as ten hours a week to the cause.
Media bias watchdogs aren’t a recent phenomenon. There’s AIM (Accuracy in Media) on the right and there’s FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) on the left, both employing small staffs. The Media Research Center, which describes itself as the leader in exposing liberal media bias, has been around since 1987 and has sixty employees and a six-million-dollar operating budget. The Fox Watch group, on the other hand, offers a new twist — an unpaid citizen’s brigade.
Volunteers file reports on a closed Web site, noting whether, in their opinion, a Fox News program has violated a standard spelled out in the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Fox News’s talk-show hosts and pundits are frequently censured by the group for what Fox Watch sees as conservative spin. Some criticism reflects the ideological differences of liberal and conservative viewpoints, but Fox Watch volunteers insist they are giving their time because they are concerned about the aggressive posturing that passes as political discussion on Fox, and the disrespectful treatment of guests with opposing viewpoints.
Noah Winer, coordinator of the Fox Watch program, isn’t convinced that Fox Watch will have any short- or long-term influence on the Fox News channel itself. “I’m not expecting a letter from Roger Ailes saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and you’re right,’” he says. But Winer does hope that the work Fox Watch is doing will persuade other news organizations not to follow Fox News’s lead. Fox, after all, has high ratings. “I’m concerned that other cable news networks are highly influenced by them,” Winer says.
Winer concedes that Fox Watch is an experiment. The group attempts to generate publicity through letter-writing, e-mail, and telephone campaigns to local newspapers, journalists, media critics, and other cable news outlets. Similar strategies have been known to backfire on Winer, as when MoveOn lobbied the New York Post to drop the syndicated columnist Robert Novak in response to the Plame affair, and the paper’s editorial page editor, Bob McManus, responded with a leak of his own, running Winer’s home telephone number in the headline of an editorial with instructions to “swarm him.”
Winer remains philosophical and committed to the belief that there will always be high-quality journalism if citizens continue to create a demand for it. “I don’t know what’s going to come out of this, but we need to start somewhere,” he says.
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