FROM CHAPTER 8.

FOX NEWS - Showing Clearly, Speaking Plainly

“And time on television is an extremely rare commodity. When you take up precious time to say banal things, to the extent that they cover up precious things, these banalities become very important.” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 18)

“Politics is not just about politicians and their constituents; it is also about communication of socially significant information that confers or denies power.” (Woodward, 1997, p. 15)

“While previous commentaries have been content with the representation of American television practices and the news broadcasting industry by mainstream Hollywood, there exists the timely opportunity to undertake an analysis of one corporate strand that so far has appeared only tangentially.

This chapter, then, will build on previous coverage of NewsCorps’ texts - namely Independence Day (1996) - and critically address the Fox News output which, as we have uncovered, was first positively platformed in that film. Our analysis centres on a single 15-minute news sequence as taped in the early months of 2002. It has been isolated as representative of the twelve hours of material that were taped over the previous four months since 11^th September 2001.

The textual analysis will be sandwiched between a Part One overview of the Fox agenda since its inception in the mid-1990s and, at its close, a Part Three with a wider account of the Fox corporate portfolio as it burgeoned across America in 2003. This will itself foreshadow our overview in Chapter Nine that will sample the range of media events that became so prominent during that year and in which the NewsCorp, as a representative of the global news media, had a deep financial interest. Those media events would prominently include FCC revisions of The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the U.K. Communications White Paper and the invasion of Iraq.

Part One - Contexts

NewsCorp and Washington, D.C. - the Hegemonic Agenda

In 1995 a relatively small circulation publication was founded called The Weekly Standard. The modest publication quickly established itself as a brash counter to the more orthodox tomes of The Nation, The New Republic and The National Review. Indeed, as edited by William Kristol, former chief of staff to Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle, it defined itself more fully as a leader of the neo-conservative agenda whose target readership did not go beyond the Washington, D.C. beltway but was focused on sharpening the Right-Wing agenda that would, within five years, dominate the three areas of government - the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. By 2003, observers were able to reflect back on the significance of the journal in defining the widening scope of the Republican programme that became more directly influential with the election of George W. Bush in 2000. In June 1997, for example, it was Kristol who formed the ‘Project for a New American Century’ which, as reported by David Carr (2003) in The International Herald Tribune of March 2003,

“…issued papers, supporting essentially unilateralist efforts to police the world. It was a call to arms that compelled neo-conservatives, who say that America is best protected by exporting its values…signers at the time included…Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld along with others…including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl who heads the Defense Policy Board which advises the Pentagon.” (Carr, The International Herald Tribune. 12.03.2003: 2)

More specifically, just one year later, and with President Clinton still in office,

“The Weekly Standard made the broad, seemingly preposterous assertion that America was entitled and even compelled to engineer regime change in Iraq. But under the current Administration, driven by Sept 11, that contention has become conventional wisdom.” (Carr, The International Herald Tribune. 12.03.2003: 2)

Carr (2003) was writing when 1998 assertion and 2001 wisdom were being transformed into brutal 2003 fact. In February of that year, 2003, President Bush was able to attend the annual dinner of the Annual Enterprise Institute to compliment Kristel’s father, Irving Kristel who, at 83, was regarded as the forbearer of the neo-conservative movement (Carr, 2003). On the question of influence, Kristel the younger, wryly answered:

“We have a funny relationship with the top tier of the administration. They very much keep us at arm’s length, but Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday.” (Carr, The International Herald Tribune. 12.03.2003: 2)

Kristel’s ironic mix of mock self-depreciation coupled with up-front marketing savvy is emblematic of an overall casual style that shows itself more clearly in the format of Fox News which also debuted in the mid-1990s. In fact the allusion is not coincidental. What is of some interest in this prelude to our study of Fox News is that The Weekly Standard was actually founded as an antidote to the New Republic by the NewsCorp organisation and which is easily able to sustain the publication’s annual deficit of one million dollars over a weekly readership of just 55,000.

The News Programme - Setting the Populist Agenda

The emergence of Fox News in October 1996 (following its teaser in Independence Day, 1996) was and remains the first real threat to the tripartite oligopoly of CBS, ABC and NBC that had characterised the American news network system. It also emerged at a time of that general public and academic discontent with U.S. news media organisation coverage (Chapter Six). As we will consider, though, Fox made much of its independent status to speak on behalf of such discontentment. In mythologizing its own history, for example, Fox premiered its weekly series Only on Fox (26.05.2001) with an explanation from the show’s host, Trace Gallagher, that,

“Five years ago, Fox News Channel was launched on the idea that something was wrong with news media - that somehow, somewhere bias found its way into reporting…and it’s not just the way you tell a story that can get in the way of the truth. It’s the stories you choose to tell… Fox News Channel is committed to being fair and balanced in the coverage of the stories everybody is reporting - and to reporting stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Stories you will see only on Fox.” (http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html /, 04.01.2003)

Its populist appeal to folks interpellated the assumed viewer explicitly against the established news networks that were - and remain - ‘revealed’ to be rhetorically positioned in their ‘Liberal’ agenda. In the light of actual ownership patterns and histories as discussed in earlier chapters, this is a criticism those ‘rival’ companies might actually (secretly) welcome. As will be discussed, this appropriation of genuine discontent with the prevailing media industry neatly veiled Fox’s own virulent Right-Wing populist agenda.

As this chapter will hope to show, the Fox agenda reflects and often galvanises popular frustration and disappointment with the network media and, by extension, the culture at large, by creating a public space that seems to enable greater social involvement and democratic participation in public affairs for its audience. As will be argued, the process confirms the most positive aspects of hegemonic practice - that which allows for knowing critical engagement by the individual - with its most negative aspects - the ability of the media elite to meet such critique via acknowledgement, appropriation and deflection. This rhetoric of involvement that equates democracy and free speech constantly prevails across virtually all forms of Fox News narratives both textually and subtextually, and is a stylistic feature which will figure in our account below. It would soon complement on a broader level the same ideological views as propounded in the more exclusive tomes of The Weekly Standard, but for a more varied popular audience.

The Global Reach of NewsCorp

The two U.S. products contribute to a roster of NewsCorp output of worldwide interests as detailed in Mc Chesney and included:

• 22 U.S. TV stations covering 40% of the population

• the U.S. Fox TV network, including Fox News and Fox Sport

• 50% stake in fx, fxM, Fox Sports Net, Foy Kids Worldwide, Family TV Channel

• 33% stake in Golf TV channel

• film studio 20^th Century Fox

• Twentieth Television, U.S. and International TV production/distribution

• over 130 daily newspapers including The Times and the New York Post

• 70% Australian newspaper market

• 23 magazines, including TV Guide

• 40% stake in the United Video Satellite Group

• 30% stake in Echostar, a US satellite division company

• ownership of Harper Collins book publishers

• the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team

• minority stakes in the New York Knickers and Rangers

• option to purchase 40% stake in Los Angeles Kings NHL hockey team

• option to purchase 10% Loss Angeles Lakers NBA basketball team

• controlling interest in British Sky Broadcasting

• 32.5% stake in British Interactive

• numerous Sky Television channels for the U.K. and Europe

• partial stake in music Choice Europe TV channels

• Latin American TV channel El Canal Fox and Fox Sport Noticias

• 30% stake in Latin Sky Broadcasting, venture with AT&T-TCI, Televisa and Globo

• 20% stake in Telecine, Brazilian pay TV service

• 66% stake in Munich TV station TM-3

• 50% stake in German Vox TV network

• Controlling interest in Italian pay - venture, Stream

• Fox TV - Netherlands

• 80% stake in New Zealand Natural History Unit

• European radio - 71% stake in Sky radio; 42% - Radio 538; 28% Sky radio Sweden

• Heritage Media - U.S. direct marketing company, revenues $500 million plus

• Stakes in Eastern European companies -PLD Telekom (30%) and PeterStar

• Asian Star TV satellite TV service

• ESPN and Star Sports

• Asian Channels - Channel V Music (four)

• Star World, Star Plus, Star Movies (nine Asian channels)

• 50% stake in Indian cable TV channels Zee TV, EL TV and Zee cinema

• partial stake in Indian cable TV company Siti cable

• partial stake in Indonesian pay TV venture Indovision and Film Indonesia

• 11% stake with Sony, Fuji TV and Softbank in Japan Sky PerfecTV

• Star Chinese Channel (Taiwan)

• 45% interest n Phoenix Chinese Channel, satellite tv for mainland China

• Australian channel FoxTel

• controlling interest in New Zealand’s Independent Newspapers Ltd

• 52% New Zealand newspaper market and 40% New Zealand Sky Television

• India Sky broadcasting, satellite TV service

• 50% stake Australian national rugby league

The list would be extended to include the takeover of DirecTV by the summer of 2003 (Chapter Nine).

The extent of NewsCorp own media empire was, by 1999, a very visible feature in world media. A year earlier, Murdoch claimed to have networks that reached 75% of the world’s population, with the future focused firmly on the rapidly expanding markets of China.

Washington, D.C. Lobbyist

Seth Ackermann (2001) of Fair & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR, www.fair.org) underscores the more Right-Wing Republican ethos operating at Fox News by detailing the intricate network of former relationships that associated its founding members to the Republican cause of the 1980s and 1990s. Daytime anchor David Asman, for example, worked formally for the conservative Manhattan Institute; the-then host of Fox News on Sunday, Tony Snow was former speech writer for the Bush administration; managing editor Brit Hume is former contributor to the conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard magazines, while Bill O’Reilly was outed as a registered Republican by The Washington Post in 2002. Further, before taking up her front line post as a jobbing journalist, Catherine Crier had a career as an elected Republican judge. Last but not least, the founder and President of Fox, Roger Ailes, actually led the election media campaigns of first Nixon, then Reagan and followed by Bush Sr. in 1988. Prior to taking the lead at Fox he worked as producer for Rush Limbaugh’s ABC television show (Chapter Five) and The New York Post, which was successfully repurchased by NewsCorp in 1993 (http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html /, 30.01.2003). As further detailed by Oliver Burkeman, as a former adviser to Nixon,

“…Reagan and the current president’s father, Ailes is profoundly irritated by accusations of enduring sympathies for the Republicans, and once reportedly urged a newspaper interviewer not to dwell on his earlier career because it was “irrelevant”. He does not, for example, take kindly to implications of bias on Election Night 2000, when Fox hired John Ellis, who happens to be the president’s cousin to analyse the returns (Fox was the first channel to declare a Bush victory that night).” (Burkeman, The Guardian. 25.11.2002)

However, denying any bias allows Fox to maintain its claims for objectivity. As further outlined by FAIR with the ascendance of Fox News Channel,

”…we now have a national conservative TV network in addition to the established centrist outlets. But unlike the mainstream outlets, Fox refuses to admit its political point of view. The result is a skewed center-to-right media spectrum made worse by the refusal to acknowledge any tilt at all.” (Ackermann, 2001, http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html , 30.01.2003)

The account has so far focused principally on the beginnings of Fox News and the political affiliations of its more public news anchors. Attention will be paid more fully to actual content - first, a short commentary of the Fox website, and then a detailed account of a selected news sequence as taped in Frankfurt during January of 2002. This was one sequence culled from many hours of available material as taped since 11^th September 2001.

News Style, Content and the Co-modification of Citizen Identity

“Express your support for Fair & Balanced news It takes about 2 minutes.”
www.foxnews.com.

Despite Fox claims to the contrary, one need not go very far on the station’s website in detailing a distinct Right-Wing angle that passes for objective news reporting. Direct quotes, for example, from a web-search on 24.11.2002 8:31pm EST revealed an alarming account of naked agenda setting that colours and determines areas of social observation, book reviews and culture coverage in terms of ultra-conservative rhetoric….

Similar snappy overviews in this “war” can be found in the book review section where, amongst those texts most prominently headlined were, from 2001, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, by Bernard Goldberg. The dubious insider account positions the rival news network (owned by Viacom) as politically Left. By inference, this form of labeling attempts to align Fox News with the more reasonable or objective middle. The provocative Fox review of the book opens thus:

“Think the media are biased? Conservatives have been crying foul for years, but now a veteran CBS reporter has come forward to expose how liberal bias pervades the mainstream media. Even if you’ve suspected your nightly news is slanted to the left, it’s far worse than you think… If you ever suspected the network news was short-changing the truth, Goldberg will not only prove you right, he’ll give you a glimpse of just how it’s done, and how fairness, balance, and integrity have disappeared from network television.”.

The marketing tease comes with a special offer to purchase Slander by Ann H. Coulter at a $16.16 discount and those titles as recently purchased, it claims, by the same readers. These titles included,

• 1. • The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House, by Barbara Olson

     • Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson,by Kenneth R. Timmerman

     • The No-Spin Zone: Confrontations with the Powerful and Famous in America,by Bill O’ Reilly

     • The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization, by Patrick J. Buchanan

     • Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGovern

(www.foxnews.com, 24.11.2002: 8:31pm EST)

It is within this historical and operational context that each programme on the Fox News channel operates.

The aesthetic of Fox News distinguished it from the main broadcasters (at the time) in its resolute attempt to capture ever-popular viewing ratings. This was achieved by creating a form that seemed to appropriate the codes and conventions of the mainstream news format and merging these with a more casual unaffected style of mise-en-scene drawn largely from the cable news environment. Like its own anchors, the Fox brand has created a corporate persona that positions itself in the public arena that combines both a propositional role as traditional deliverer of news content and a performative role as media underdog asserting the best practices of raw investigative journalism (“we report, you decide…”)…

Despite the rhetoric of competition that compares ratings across the news broadcasters, the success of Fox has created a more aggressive commercial environment that allows the more established ‘players’ a helpful excuse in undertaking decisions of style and content that they might otherwise take, in time. Either way, the hegemonic structure remains in place by conforming to Glynn’s (2000) overall point that describes how,

“…at each point where dominating power confronts its “counterstroke”, its “underside”, its “limit”, the weak power on which it runs aground forms the “motivation” for new developments within its own networks of domination, which in turn provokes the emergence of new resistive strategies.” (Glynn, 2000, p. 232)

Hence, just as ABC in the 1950s drove the leading networks of NBC and CBS towards more competitive strategies to secure more comparative ratings in a smaller market (Chapter Three), so Fox in the 1990s forced resistive strategies in the same networks that nevertheless led to even greater comity with the tabloid style that Fox was establishing. In the case of the Fox News style, one can see the profitable combination of orthodox network codes and conventions resting on the “counterstroke” of early citizen cable networks of the 1980s - a mix of 1950s bubble gum colour-coding and folksy cable TV street vernacular in the latter set within mainstream genre structures of the former. Its patterned mode of address that in diction and turns of phrase deliberately echoes, as well, the equally mannered folksy drawls more often associated with members of the East Coast ruling political elite that presupposes an unaffected easy familiarity with its assumed audiences.

The negotiation of meanings with those audiences that Fox constructs begins and ends at the screen face with that process of identification commonly known to structuralists as interpellation, or audience/reader positioning. At this point, the account is indebted to Bagley (2001) who, quoting Smith (1994) provides a useful overview of how successful television reception relies on three stages of audience engagement.

The first relies on basic patterns of recognition “wherein characters and settings are perceived in a context of relative plausibility” (this, I would assume, comes under the general category of genre recognition, which in the case of television news includes techno studio set, medium-shot frames and, most importantly, apparent reciprocal eye contact ‘with’ the viewer by the anchor). Thereafter comes stages two and three involving:

“…a move to align ourselves with a given character’s point of view and the third, one’s adoption of allegiance whereby the viewer comes to rank the character’s relative morality. This last stage is the culmination of cognition.” (Bagley, 2001, p. 448)

This account optimistically posits the viewer in the role of objective referee able to weigh with equanimity the relative merits of the televisual codes; hence for Bagley (2001),

“Allegiance satisfies the view that television viewing is active rather than passive because it calls upon the individual to make cognitive and emotional decisions on the basis of character depiction…by viewing the narrative depiction, each individual exercises his or her consent once again to an ideology that is most consistent with, or attractive to, these implicit views.” (Bagley, 2001, p. 449)

However, without undermining the general thrust of Bagley (2001), we ought to consider how media messages - as sent by commercial broadcasters such as Fox - already assume this active possibility in the targeted viewer. As will be argued in the following analysis, the Fox style, that assiduously and continuously attempts to engineer ideological consent, is itself a measure of the truth of Bagley’s (2001) assertions which, after Gramsci (1971), localise the legitimisation process as a site of continuing struggle over meanings but which are continually staged and dramatised on the corporately-owned public stage.

The result is a virulent and unremitting appeal to the assumed viewer through codes and conventions of genre, narrative, and representation to make allegiance with the worldview of a major global news corporation that speaks to and for the ‘folks’. One crucial aspect of style that we will address is that which elicits the “ethos of participatory engagement” that pervades tabloid style (Glynn, 2000). This is of particular relevance in our study of Fox News style and address as it insinuates a democratic sense of participation and unbiased debate.

The sequence under scrutiny was amongst twelve hours of broadcasting taped between 11^th September 2001 and 28^th January 2002 and covers a single programme sequence from the telecast anchored by Shepard Smith then Neil Cavuto as transmitted to Europe. The sequence collaged studio interviews, outside broadcast unit deliveries, extensive pre-recorded interviews/statements and archive footage on ENG. This factor alone qualifies our understanding of what constitutes the ‘liveness’ of such broadcasting and its claims to ontological truth (Feuer, 1983).

Part Two - The Text

Case Study # 13: THE FOX NEWS SEQUENCE (24^th January 2002)

The News Narrative and the Organisation of Allegiance

The prime coverage anticipated two events due to take place over the last weekend of January 2002 - the World Economic Forum in New York and the World Super Bowl in New Orleans (and televised exclusively that weekend by Fox News). The sequence covers the last 15 minutes of the Shepard Smith Report that was transmitted between 3 pm - 4 pm EST on 24^th January 2002. The pattern of report coverage was as follows:

1. INT. STUDIO - a trailer from Neil Caputo detailing his coming programme
2. INT. STUDIO - back to Smith for a brief introduction to the OBU in New York.
3. EXT NEW YORK OBU Unit - Tod Connor’s coverage of how New York was preparing for the coming World Economic Forum, including a recorded exchange with the President of Friends of the Earth
4. INT STUDIO - Smith interview with John Timoney, Former Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police
5. COMMERCIAL BREAK
6. EXT NEW ORLEANS - from Brian Kilmeade
7. INT. STUDIO - insert on television commercials for the Super Bowl - close from Smith
8. INT: STUDIO - Neil Cavuto interview with Phillip Condit CEO Boeing

Across all programming sequences, a running banner featuring latest news reports and stock market listings are figured prominently at the bottom of the screen and an American flag proudly unfurls in an invisible digitalised wind at the top left of the screen corner.

INT. STUDIO, a trailer from Neil Caputo detailing his coming programme

The opening trailer from Neil Cavuto (Managing Business Editor) allows the anchor for the next programme to highlight the featured items for the coming hour. These are largely centred on coverage of the World Economic Forum and the series of rallies and demonstrations that have been organised around it. Both Smith and Cavuto confirm that this is a “heightened security alert” based around the Waldorf Hotel which, Cavuto mentions in passing, is “just a couple of blocks from us…”. With Fox News at the centre of the coming storm, Cavuto continues his round up with a gesture towards news balance but which ends in weighted angst:

Cavuto: …most of these guys are pretty peaceful demonstrators at that, but if so much as one person shows up in a mask,

Shep, then all hell could break loose… because…

PAUSE

…in New York you can be arrested (BEAT) for wearing a mask.

The earnest delivery to camera (second anchor/viewer) is accompanied here by a token open hand gesture that ‘to’ Smith interpellates or hails the viewer ‘as’ the second unseen anchor ‘as’ an implied contributor to the ‘exchange’. Having set the uncertain dramaturgy of the weekend in motion, Cavuto closes with a quick overview that looks beyond the-then present invasion of Afghanistan:

Cavuto: A couple of things we are also following - some of the attendees and what they are thinking there - obviously terrorism and the administration might want to expand that war to counties like Iran, and Iraq and North Korea – very much a concern to all the attendees including Phil Condit, Chairman of Boeing - he’s there and will be talking to us live…the Chairman of Merck, he’s going to be talking to us live…

Cavuto finishes with an upbeat overview of the economic situation - a “major league rally” that means “we are off to the races”, with the picture from Wall Street “up smartly over 9000 on the Dow…”.

INT. STUDIO - back to Smith for a brief introduction to the OBU in New York.

The final fifteen minutes of the Smith show that will lead to this coverage bears some extended analysis. It begins with the OBU unit live in New York and leads to the related Smith - Timoney interview. The OBU insert is introduced and framed by Smith thus:

Smith: In the meantime New York’s finest are keeping the streets peaceful…for as Neil mentioned…protestors who have threatened to disrupt the World Economic Forum are  descending…there we go…

…and the screen cuts swiftly to a forceful station insert frame “WAR ON TERROR” and then finds OBU reporter-on-the-scene Todd Connor ready to deliver his piece from the streets of New York:

EXT. NEW YORK OBU Unit

Connor: Well, Shepard, eh, no protestors really to speak of outside the Waldorf and the World Economic Forum. However, police still made some arrests. I’m going to tell you all about those in just a few minutes, but first we are going to show you just how quiet it’s been around here today…police literally everywhere…

We then cut to pre-recorded material taken at the scene - long-photo shots of uniformed police personnel in the winter rain at various positions - on horses, lingering bored at the entrance of a Gap shop, and even caught on top of a roof looking directly to the television camera through binoculars:

Connor: Even on the rooftops - they are looking for trouble but not finding any, and that’s because all the activists are in their own meetings or just didn’t show up to New York. Period. At least not yet. That of course is fine for the police many of whom think that’s because their strong show of force has something to do with it…

A screen banner appears: Police will be near stores like Gap.

Despite the fact that he has no news, his report does, however, include an exchange with Brent Blackwelder the President of the Friends of the Earth as recorded - and edited - a short time earlier from the same location:

Connor: I asked how his group will react if protestors turn violent…

The cut shows us a medium shot in a wet New York street peopled by passing pedestrians huddled against the rain. “We will try and leave the area…so that we are not associated with violence”, says Blackwelder. There is then a tight jump-cut intending to disguise the editing of the Blackwelder answer, that continues with,

Blackwelder: …the point is we have a serious message…we are trying to get that across…and so we will…violence gets in the way of our message we believe…

However, whatever important message Blackwelder perhaps made on behalf of Friends of the Earth which might have been shot by Fox News, remains unknown. Instead, we return live to Connor to close his piece by finally ‘answering’ his carefully plotted opening enigma - an explanation that will tell us “all about those arrests”:

Connor: So, eh, police aren’t getting too comfortable here, they know there will be massive rallies and protests on Saturday. Now to those arrests I promised to tell you all about. Five women were arrested for trespassing for climbing on top of a building and unfurling a banner. A twenty-three year-old California man was arrested for defacing a Starbucks door, some windows at a Gap clothing store were scratched - and a couple of other isolated incidents around the city that - more than likely - will be related to the World Economic Forum.

To remind us of the visual context of the reports (as determined by Fox), underneath the image of Connor we can read the rolling banner headlines:

Hizbollah guerrillas fire on Israeli jets over southern Lebanon…Nat’l Security advisor Condoleeza Rice: The U.S. has made clear that there is no such thing as a good terrorist and a bad terrorist: you cannot condemn Al Qaeda and hug Hamas…

The uncomfortable blending in these instances of direct quote, assertion and unattributed statement of ‘fact’ all emerging as from an electronic tele-printer is itself of concern in determining the status of such breaking-news format.

On screen above, Connor reaches to his final denouement - an affected aside - that helpfully foreshadows another possible confrontation to be reported later:

Connor: …and speaking of Gap, Shep, eh, in a little less than an hour there’s going to be a rally with - Jobs With Justice and the AFL and CIO outside a different Gap here in midtown, 54^th and 5^th Avenue. So we will have a report from there a little bit later on this evening. That’s all that’s happening here right now, back to you…

The whole report, therefore, constructs a visual and narrative motif that positions the comfy Gap store as emblematic soft victim of possible “massive” rallies over the weekend and union activity in the near future. In both instances, the stores are to be protected by the New York Police Department in its capacity as defender of civil rights. Closure in the final seconds, therefore, furthers the corporate agenda by deftly aligning The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations along an associational link that subliminally extends from a scratched door in downtown New York at one extreme to the global terrorist campaign against the United States on the other.

Masking Reality - Selecting the Agendas and Overcoding the Message

The presence of the reporter live at the scene suggests full coverage, but even light scrutiny of what is provided reveals telling gaps where more details might provide a deeper scope of debate and a wider understanding of events that were possible but denied - for example,

• what questions and answers emerge from the ‘activists’ meeting?

• what message is Brent Blackwelder trying so hard to get across?

• what few words were on the unfurled banner?

• why did it choose to stage its presence in New York anyway

• finally, what is the wage of a Gap worker ?(see Klein, 2001, p. 476)

The reader at this stage is of course invited to fill in the narrative gaps which the full transcription exposes and which would underscore the manufactured nature of the report that conveniently makes much ideological advances at the expense of very little actual news coverage:

INT. STUDIO - Smith interview with John Timoney, Former Commissioner of Philadelphia Police

However, as if the limited range of images from the Connor’s report was not enough, Smith ushers his viewers back to the studio with a supportive over- coded claim that assists the viewers in equating the live visual aesthetic with full knowledge:

Smith: As you can see…they aren’t taking any chances.

The “they” obliquely but very effectively allows for an active reading that nudges the viewer towards an imagined identification with the (assumed) police position but keeps the possibility of danger open. His interview then begins with a personal welcome, in the third person, and a general positioning of the expert primarily as:

Smith: …a high ranking New York city police officer - before he moved to head Philadelphia’s Police Department and now he runs…what is it…Beau Dietl & Associates…?

Timoney: That’s right, Shep

Smith: …a New York investigative and security sort of firm…

Smith quickly makes exaggerated locker-room reference to the Super Bowl - “sorry about your Eagles, by the way…can you get tickets….no way!” - and then, from a two-shot, he edges more seriously into the main discussion with the dour John Timoney who sits camera right with a large colour map of the Persian Gulf dominating his background. Smith’s opening question and Timoney’s reply extend from the previous Connor report:

Smith: They are working hard here by the way to keep this thing safe. You know the protestors are saying - “Oh, we’re gonna be safe and…”, but they have shown a propensity in the past…

Like a perfectly pitched football play, the loaded onomatopoeia is quickly picked up by the interviewee, though as we can see, there has been no actual question:

Timoney: …in the past…if the past is any guide and it usually is… expect some kind of trouble over the next two days, eh, Saturday is the planned big day, but I think tomorrow - because tomorrow is the last day of the week - lots of traffic, lots of opportunities, lots of opportunities to hit and run, hide in traffic, cause some chaos - so tomorrow… I know for a fact that there are a number of demonstrations planned throughout the city, not necessary by the way at the Waldorf…you just focused there on the Waldorf, but there maybe trouble elsewhere…

Their exchange is intercut with the identical material already seen from Connor’s OBU report (video recorded shots of police inactivity in a wet New York) and this is now sequenced into archive footage from the (wet) Seattle street protests. This interplay between live commentary and archive footage, for Feuer (1983), a “doubly temporal sequence”, is resonant with that form of narrative overlay which is a common feature of sports programming and where the word/logos is given interpretative priority over the visual offerings on the screen. Hence, there is an overlay of temporal shifts with the studio commentators commenting live on past events as shown within the live broadcast. As we will discuss below, consideration of such sequences helpfully question the live status of broadcast news and therefore its claims to objectivity (Feuer, 1983). Back to the studio we pick up a baffled Smith who now reads from his prepared script:

Smith: Some of this still wants me to scratch my head…this quote from David Graber, a Yale Anthropology Professor and a member of the anarchist group Anti Capitalist Convergence… a quote from him now: “We’re not going to break anyone’s heads…it’s up to the police if there is violence. If they attack us, they are the ones who are being violent…”

Smith places the paper down, a suggestive performative gesture that implies how the interview under way has not been rehearsed, has not been scripted, but comes ‘naturally’ and reasonably from the two men. With still no actual question asked but a point only suggested, the seasoned Timoney launches into his own explanatory soliloquy that oddly concludes with a strident defence of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

Timoney: There’s no way…I know the people in charge, Ray Kelley, Al Hale, the, the Chief who is running this whole operation, he’s got thirty years of experience…

PAUSE

“They can take any kind of verbal abuse without, eh, eh, reacting. However, if the protestors lay their hands on police, if they break police lines, if they engage in asaultive behaviour…then the police are justified in using the necessary force to, eh, to place those protestors under arrest…but I can guarantee you that the freedom of speech will be guaranteed”.

To justify the sense of eminent danger, the discussion then makes extended reference to the previous World Economic Forum in Seattle and now includes a string of selected video images of street protesters and police forces in various stages of confrontation. Interestingly, one such image shows a young woman reading from a prepared statement while being forcefully evicted from a building. Her unheard statement to the crushed news crews is quickly ripped from her by an off-screen presence. Over these images we hear the on-going discussion between the anchor and his invited expert:

Smith: …people were saying, “…who are these people who are causing the problems…” and, and, some of them were categorizing them as people who are against the new world order…or whatever…but if you look at them as individuals…..

(SLOWER) …they seem like individuals who just like to stir up trouble.

The street images from Seattle close on the final word on this issue from Timoney,

Timoney: (OFF): Spoilt brats in some cases

The return cut to the studio provides us with a regular two-shot that brings anchor and guest into closer spatial agreement:

Smith: That’s a description that I heard repeatedly. And Mayor Bloomberg said we can’t let these people come in and run over our city, there are people’s hearts still bleeding.

Now in its rushed last stages Smith shifts the focus of the exchange to his guest and how he will contribute to the protection of New York citizens in the coming days. This is heralded by refashioning his angled social persona:

Smith: Now your company is promising some individual security…that’s pretty impressive.

At this point the banner at the bottom of the screen reads: Beau Dietl & Associates, and Timoney, with his new persona positively established, shifts to rehearsed marketing mode:

Timoney: That’s right, that’s right…there are a variety of venues away from the Waldorf where lunches, breakfasts and receptions at night are being held, so we are providing armed security, all our folks are retired NYPD, well trained, well disciplined, professional police officers providing armed protection for the individuals, for some of the parties, for some of the receptions, so we don’t expect any of these problems.

We cut from the medium shot on Timoney back to the two-shot that opened the sequence, with Shepard to the dominant right looking to Timoney left, thus signalling the end of the interview with Smith bringing some anchorage to the subject and an endearing fraternal touch to his final exchange with his guest:

Smith: And hopefully there won’t be…we have a team of people all over the city - this morning people who commute from the outer boros and from New Jersey and Connecticut are saying we spent an hour at the tunnel this morning - checking every car. (heavy) They have this place locked down.

PAUSE

(light) It’s good to see you, actually. It can be done in a new normal.

Timoney: (winking) There you go.

Smith: Good to see you

Timoney: Good to see you, Shep

Smith’s turn to front camera signals a change of subject and tone - from weighted earnestness to light and cheery - and as heightened by some further onomatopoeic indulgence:

Smith: All right. Coming up at the Sunday Super Bowl - the pitches will get nearly as much attention as the passes…we’ll show you some of the blockbuster advertising that they will show during the game - coming up…

INT. COMMERCIAL BREAK

Sheppard’s chirpy up-beat punched delivery to camera becomes a voice-over that matches selected outtakes from a range of fast, furious and fun television commercials - prominently Levis and Coke, that then bizarrely segues a short time later into the ‘real’ commercial break, which in Germany was blanketed by a station signal-card intended to ban advertising transmissions. However, the traditional line between advertisement and programming becomes indeterminate when news coverage positions $ multibillion corporate businesses as victims of minor street crime and which also includes, at the end, a news report that makes corporate advertising a newsworthy subject to report.

We are, of course, alert to the strengths of reception studies that underline and sometimes celebrate the riches available in the sliding signifier of the polysemic text for the active reader. However, reflecting back to Dow (1996), we are also alert to the underlying rhetorical strategies that determinedly work hard to make certain reading practices smoother than others, whether they be found in Hollywood films, television news broadcasts or even academic theses. Calling to the cognitive and the emotional is one instance where,

“As Barthes notes, the producer has a hand in what these paths of possible interpretation will be, and has an interest (as well as a set of strategies) in ‘overcoding’ a particular path of interpretation and ‘undercoding’ others.” (Jacobs, 1996, p. 374)

The news sequence from Fox described so far is obviously worthy of critical discussion in several areas where the term ‘overcoding’ is clearly an understatement.

Firstly, we can consider how the prominence given to the World Economic Forum from this particular narrative perspective conforms to how potential events are shaped as the likely source of news coverage (Jacobs, 1996). The potential conflict (in New York) becomes newsworthy once it is plotted as part of an ongoing story genre (act one Seattle, act two New York) with some narrative tension now maximised in terms of its likely development and possible outcome. It also presents ready-made cast of unseen villains complemented by visible studio heroes.

The positioning of opposing sides in this respect is not coincidental with the parallel story - the Super Bowl in New Orleans. The direct associations made by Smith (however ‘unscripted’) help generate the subliminal motif that projects into a near future two opposing sides coming together in conflict. The certain scheduled contest of the New Orleans Super Bowl, then, provides the inclusive frame of likelihood that makes possible or credible the anticipated confrontations in New York that are feared. Hence, the parallel editing across cities delivers a narrative tension worthy of any Hollywood screenplay that brings opposing forces into act three collision. In support of this meta-narrative, we can also include Timoney’s expert technicist language of “hit and run” that simultaneously neatly weaves tactical discourses of guerilla warfare and sport into one.

What should be of some surprise to a European readership is how the assumed television audience is so clearly interpellated to identify with the aims and objectives of the potential victims who are clustered as the police forces, corporate businesses and the people of New York who, following the attacks of 11^th September 2001 a few months earlier, are “still bleeding”.

This form of ideological shaping (fusing the interests of terrorists and activists against the status quo of business interests), is grounded on that form of audience hailing that is the prime task of the anchor. However, we have come a long way from the subtle intricate nuances of Tom Grutnick/William Hurt of Broadcast News (1987). The ideological project in 2002 is fully dramatised by Smith who helpfully overcodes the frame of his already over-coded text - affecting at times bafflement, surprise, some frustration, even amazement, in his exchange with the deadpan Timoney. While his delivery skirts a range of emotional registers, his script also provides a range of shifting personae. For example, he can be the neutral non-combatant by ascribing supporting opinions to unseen and unverifiable sources - “…people were saying”, or just another member of confused Joe Public looking for guidance and direction in his awe-shucks sense of apparent disbelief (“…some of this stuff wants me to scratch my head…”).

His wide acting repertoire is particularly in evidence in the reading of the letter where he appropriates the assumed voice of David Graber and adopts tones of belligerence and anger when reading quotes as if directed from Graber himself. His personification of Graber’s assumed presence is one of the several layered ironies that proliferate across the sequence since the letter as read makes Graber’s absence all the more telling in a news broadcast that purports to uphold certain freedoms of speech. By contrast, his more assertive role at the end - that firmly assures us with pointed finger to the desk that the city is “buttoned down” - places him securely in the adopted home of the embattled police force. This account that highlights the modes of anchor address is in keeping with Campbell’s (1991) own analysis of of the CBS showcase 60 Minutes, which helped clarify how reporters (Mike Wallace, Diane Sawyer) are scripted to adopt fictionalised character persona, from an available cache of personae that include the investigator/detective, analyst/therapist and even tourist/adventurer, and which are performative options that are adopted in accordance to the chosen genre mode of the report (Chapter Seven and Mad City, 1997).

Our critical analysis at this point is supported by a range of commentaries that have focused on the dramaturgy of the broadcast interview in general and the role(s) of the news anchors in particular. In this light, our specific account of Fox News is presented as a sample of marked tendencies in narrative and visual rhetorics said to be pervasive across the commercial U.S. broadcasting system (Croteau and Hoynes, 1994; Bourdieu, 1996 and Stein, 2001).

In the case of the late Pierre Bourdieu (1996), for example, “second level of activity” reminds us that,

“The set is there in front of viewers, and what they see hides what they don’t see - and what they don’t see is in this constructed image, are the social conditions of its construction.” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 34)

For our present analysis we are indebted to Roth (1998) whose own research based on dramaturgical principles of transactional exchange is particularly prescient. Roth (1998) begins with a consideration of Croteau and Hoynes (1994) and their detailed account of guest lists on U.S. mainstream news broadcast interviews on the basis of race, gender and institutional affiliation/status. From their research in actual casting, Croteau and Hoynes (1994) found that,

“…the range of guests helps to define the limits of legitimate debate and stakes out the limits of dissenting opinion.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 1994)

In other words, the initial casting of the social actors in the forum of debate often determined the outcome of what passes as a debate across supposed equal values, a feature already explored in the Chapter Six analysis of Mad City (1997).

Roth (1998) takes this a stage further by recognising how the interview itself is a dynamic forum of interchange wherein the actor (primarily the interviewee) is positioned and presented within the limits of a carefully shaped social persona (by the interviewer) in a manner that matches the overall agenda of the line of questioning - and the corporation’s bigger agenda. Roth’s (1998) focus, therefore, is in how, through introductory patter and selected and shaped biographical supportive accounts, the interviewer frames and presents the persona of the interviewee (soft start) and how this friction becomes the investigative content of the interview (hard middle). As Roth (1998) puts it,

“Through these selective descriptions, interviewers formulate the aspects of an interviewee’s persona that matter for this particular interview and warrant this particular question…it remains for the interviewer to establish the interviewee’s persona that are relevant to the developing news story.” (Roth, 1998, p. 87). Further, after the selective casting has been made (according to age, gender and status),

“In selecting what to describe and formulating how to describe it, interviewers make choices that shape the interactional relevance of the descriptions they produce.” (Roth, 1998, p. 87)

Roth (1998) looks to three different but standard uses of the form that provide useful reference points for our analysis of the selected sequence (and for that matter, for all news interviews and Fox News programming in general). They are:

• establishing expertise

• juxtaposing multiple perspectives; and, more provocatively

• challenging the familiar accepted personae

However, Roth (1998) proceeds to describe the orthodox assumed conventions that codify such exchanges. Our interest is in how closely the Fox version observes the genre conventions not just in form - but in spirit as well. This gap is fully exposed in comparing the minimal coverage of the President of the Friends of the Earth - who has a “serious message” to get across - with the extended conversational chat with the guest expert, John Timoney. While the cold and wet Blackwelder is both taped and tightly edited - and only in response to a loaded question about possible violence from protestors - Timoney is positioned comfortably in the secure studios of Fox News where he speaks authoritatively for the forces of law and order - and from where he obligingly guarantees the principle of the freedom of speech on their behalf. The contrast is supported in visual terms where Blackwelder is shot in a dramatically inferior position at an oblique angle looking down, while Timoney is framed at a respectful distance that does not intrude into his physical/psychic space. The lack of penetrating visual close-up assists in the unquestioning agenda of the interview.

Once Timoney’s reputable persona/status as former police commissioner has been established and called upon during most of the exchange, he can then speak on the public platform of national news as the head of a private company making good business in securing the protection of, note, “individuals” in this time of “heightened security alert”. So while the form of the studio exchange that develops seems to agree with codes and conventions of traditional studio interviews (soft launch, hard middle, soft landing), the actual minimal news information content and casual style of delivery betrays a highly skewed (and not very subtextual) ideological slant that is neatly smothered by the fraternal style of buddy discourse between anchor and interviewee. This unpremeditated surface effect works assiduously in deflecting any possible critical reading of the programme flow. Looking back to Roth (1998), we can quickly identify where the news item:

• establishes expertise (though it equates this with experience),

• makes some surface gesture to juxtapose multiple perspectives but

• makes no attempt in challenging the familiar accepted personae of its
  studio guest and the opinions he has.

On the contrary, it effectively undermines the standing of Yale Professor Graber - who is kept off-stage - and upholds the secondary persona of Timoney as a businessman. It is not an interview; it is not a discussion. It is a highly scripted exchange that, in the end, provides a (crude) commercial platform for a security firm manned by former civil guardians whose skills and know-how, once in the service of the public, are now employed to protect corporate executives, as “individuals”.

This profound imbalance of views, opinions and accounts which this single sequence exposes, also functions very knowingly within the terms of a wider more vital rhetoric that touches on the provision in the First Amendment that is designed to guarantee the right of free speech. Timoney’s direct reminder, uncontested by Smith, that, ”the freedom of speech will be guaranteed” is, in the light of our analysis, a rich, but uncomfortable assertion.

With the return from the commercial break, we are perhaps reminded from Comstock (1989) that,

“A persuasive theme of television entertainment is the satisfaction to be achieved from consumption…another theme is that the world is a mean and risky place.” (Comstock, 1989, p. 172)

EXT. NEW ORLEANS

from Brian Kilmeade

The return takes us first to Smith in the studio then live to the outside coverage from New Orleans, anchored by Brian Kilmeade. The lead-in from cheerleader Smith in New York is characteristically sprightly and is accompanied by a change to razzle-dazzle title and whooshy sound effects designed to imitate the rapid passing of a football across the screen:

Smith: This year more than ever, the Super Bowl, the symbol of life going on in America, and also, unfortunately a potential target (BEAT) for the evil ones.

PAUSE

Brian Kilmeade who is not evil has been checking out the security for the big game is with us now from the Big Easy.

What’s Up!!

This is followed by the formulaic buddy patter that across the anchors on Fox television establishes the homely environment that viewers should recognise as Fox Friends. In this instance it also bizarrely creates the persona of fellow anchor as featured national star attraction as well:

Kilmeade: Absolutely, Shep, we can’t wait for your arrival, there’s a buzz about Shepard Smith comin’ to the big city, but first…

And so Kilmeade, with open shirt and no tie, swoops into a breathless coverage of the security arrangements for the weekend contest that includes a recorded interview and then the more upbeat special items that will feature in the three-hour Fox broadcast. Viewers are privileged at this point in seeing “an exclusive preview of the Declaration of Independence being read by some NFL legends”. A few shots include recorded golden- hour coverage at the San Francisco bridge of prominent sports stars reverentially reciting the words of the Declaration of Independence. In closing, we have a final modest sales pitch from a breathless Kilmeade who assures how,

Kilmeade: It’s going to be as moving as anything you’ve ever seen.I’ve seen people who have put together the biggest shows on the planet say you’re not going to believe what we are going to present to America shortly on Sunday, and they expect all-time ratings…

INT STUDIO

- insert on television commercials for the Super Bowl

The last line back to the studio is picked up by Smith who reminds us that:

Smith: Super Bowl is home to the best ads of the year…

And this segues swiftly into the next and last news item of the show - a series of taped statements as part of assumed interviews with market expert Wayne Friedman and Anna Brockway, Levis Corporate Marketing Director. These headshots are accompanied by a zestful sequence of zappy edited highlights from those commercials that will be transmitted in full during the Sunday game. Profiled commercials in this news item include Pepsi (featuring Britney Spears), Seven Up, Budweiser beer, Blockbuster Video and Levi Jeans. In the latter case, there is a novel extension to the principle of representative democracy that allows potential consumers some voting power in the marketing decisions of corporate America. As explained by Brockway, viewers can “decide” and,

Brockway: …participate by logging on to Levi.co, and when they go there they can see all three commercials that are potential candidates to run in the Super Bowl…and we’ll pick the one that wins and run it in the game.

This is what Glynn (2000) would describe as the “ethos of participatory engagement”, adopted by the rhetoric of politicians, then broadcast television, and the sponsors themselves. From McAllister (2002) we learn that the coverage within Fox News of its own coverage of the Super Bowl is a form of ‘plugola’, a quasi-legal term created by the FCC and which is,

“…defined as “when a person responsible for including promotional material in a broadcast has a financial interest in the goods, or…the group being promoted…”.” (McAllister, 2002, p. 384, italics added)

McAllister (2002) helpfully points out the increase in such practices in a news environment that is losing its overall audience share and in a mediascape that allows single corporations such as NewsCorp to advertise its own programming services across its various divisions as news. The additional topping that then includes the actual advertising package as subject of a separate but related news item fuses the commercial interests of broadcaster with the advertisers who are provided free air time to speak of their promotional gimmick. Lest Fox News takes up too much of our own time, McAllister (2002) writes with specific reference to how NBC capitalised on the final showing of its major hit Seinfeld in 1997 when,

“…during its May 14^th evening news, only hours before the finale, NBC aired a news report about the commercials to be aired during that evening’s Seinfeld. This was the third longest segment of the broadcast, lasting 2:30. What, though, is the harm of this 21/2 minute promotional story? Viewing news as a democratic resource provides one answer.” (McAllister, 2002, p. 398)

In agreement with most media analysts, McAllister (2002) accounts for such corporate intertextual strategies that merge journalist endeavour and entertainment with reference to those deregulatory changes since the 1980s and specifically, the elimination of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules and the passing of The Communications Act of 1996 (Chapter Seven).

Returning to our sequence, the sparky plugola in the Shepard Smith Report, then, takes viewers pleasantly to the top of the hour and the start of the Neil Cavuto programme that purports to focus more resolutely on serious business and economic affairs. In contrast to Shepard’s classically proportioned bearing, Cavuto, also white, is appropriately cast as the chubby spectacled, hence more academically orientated anchor who is quick with the passing data flow of latest stock shares, Dow Jones indicators and graphic company forecasts. However, despite the changed anchor, tone and format, the ideological agenda that weaves and supports the interests of corporate entities and power elites that we have detailed so far remains virtually the same.

INT. STUDIO/OBU. Neil Cavuto Interview with Philip Condit, Boeing

In the case of the live reports and interviews from the World Economic Forum, for example, the link between the two, as mediated by the news broadcaster, becomes nakedly explicit.

The exchange from Neil Cavuto in the studio and the CEO of Boeing, Phillip Condit from the Waldorf hotel, is significantly revealing since it signals that Fox News has a news crew both outside the beleaguered hotel and inside at the same time. Whereas in the first instance we were positioned in the streets as fellow participant observers with the New York Police Department, “looking for trouble but not finding any”, we are invited to an exchange with one of the individual participants at the Forum under protection.

The five-minute interview is in the context of the significant rise in defence expenditure as planned by the Bush administration, and later passed by Congress, in its war against global terror. Rather than talk about the issue in terms of ethics, however, Cavuto frames the issue in terms of how the advance of taxpayer’s money will impact on the strategic production programme at Boeing as a problem to be shared:

Cavuto: “…let’s talk logistically, what you would have to do. Obviously this would ramp up production of a lot of key defense offerings – forty eight billion dollars that the administration wants to see. (BEAT) How much of that are you going to get?”

Condit: “It will come in lots of different pieces - it ranges everywhere from Smart bombs which we do up to the C 17s which are the primary logistics tool in this campaign to things like FA 18s which are one of the primary fighters in this thing.”

On cue, and as if to confirm the rehearsed nature of the live exchange, Condit (left) shares the split screen with a silent running sequence of video clips (right) showing aircraft carriers, fighter jets and, finally, military helicopters in action around the world. Below is a banner headline that, timed with a helicopter in flight, reads ‘High Flier’.

Condit: “So each one of those we will see. The last one is probably tankers.”

Giving the impression that his direct and provocative question has been directly answered, Cavuto now refigures the questions to consider the form of the meeting in the context of the “heightened state of alert” reported just a few minutes earlier from Todd Conner in the Shepard Smith Report. At this point, we are back with the single alternating shots from Cavuto to Condit:

Cavuto: “So far so good, do you think that will still be the case?”

Condit: “I sure hope so…um, everybody that is here is concerned about all of those issues, they are not ignored, they are really part of every discussion, and I hope the people (BEAT) that are interested in that realize that.”

Cavuto: “You know…there was some scepticism expressed by some of the attendees that maybe they shouldn’t attend, that they were concerned for their own safety…” TIGHT PAUSE: “Were you?”

In the light of those video sequences that have just shown the mighty force of Boeing weaponry, the shaping of the Condit persona as a possible beleaguered victim of activist attack, is jaw dropping:

Condit: “I think if we, if we take that attitude, we’re not gonna be in the right place, um, if you let it affect you, it will affect you, and my feeling was - I needed to be here.”

With his rise to heroic status established, Cavuto pushes the hardened investigative line:

Cavuto: “But you weren’t any stranger when it got hot and heavy in Seattle - your old haunt - and there were a lot of people concerned that it might happen here. If it DOES happen here, do you think that global type conference can go on without a hitch or is it just…”

Condit: “It think that it will be continuing to be important, global conferences are important, there will be those who want to disrupt them and there are those who want to join the conversation - the conversation is important, and we just got to try and do that.”

Cavuto: “Phil Condit, CEO of Boeing, good to see you, sir”

Condit: “Thanks, Neil”

This final personal appeal to activists to join in the “conversation” and the deferential sign of obligation to corporate business America from corporate media America brings to an end this sequence description and commentary from Fox News of 24^th January 2002. (Condit would later resign from Boeing in December 2003 following the firing of the company’s chief financial adviser, Michael Sears, and programme manager, Darleen Druyun.

Their earlier dismissal followed irregularities between Boeing and the Pentagon and, specifically, improper meetings that took place between Sears and Druyan when she was the chief procurement officer for the Pentagon prior to her appointment at Boeing in January 2003 under Phil Condit).

The Fox Metatext - Ideologies through Narratives

The obliging coda from the CEO of one of America’s biggest military suppliers to activists to “join the conversation” completes a subtextual refrain that has ghosted all the separate discourses - from sports through advertising to economics - that together make up the corporate meta-text that is Fox News. The selection of news items, their narrative framing and stylistic delivery converge in an ideological agreement that unifies the interests of commercial, military and entertainment entities across all reports.

It is a mendacious agreement that codes within the same frame of reference, for example, Gap stores, the New York Police Department, Britney Spears and Boeing “smart bombs” - a surreal gaga of visual motifs and aural impressions all compressed within a seventeen-minute blitz but all supporting a very focused and determined persuasive rhetoric that keeps certain social groups out of the ‘debate’ and certain corporate entities at its centre. The representative sequence - chosen from 12 hours of available material - is testimony to Glynn’s (2000) persuasive argument that,

“Tabloid media are not a discursive democracy wherein all the voices in society contest one another on equal grounds. The current high visibility of tabloid media demands to be understood not in terms of liberal pluralism but rather in terms of power and of the procedures whereby socially weak and strong voices and knowledges contest one another from dominant and subordinate positions.” (Glynn, 2000, p. 232)

The single sequence is clearly rich in supportive examples. For instance, while former New York police chiefs “guarantee” the freedom of speech, real access to “the conversation” is curtailed by a skewed news agenda that deliberately limits the range of voices made available while simultaneously celebrating ‘choices’ to be made in the selection of television commercials that will figure in another NewsCorp product. The degree of corporate purchase on the social and civil public sphere is most notably visible and audible in this last instance where the Levi Strauss marketing campaign so ruthlessly appropriates and assimilates the language of democratic political discourse - “participate”, “candidates”, “voting” - into its marketing strategy that invites viewers to its website where they must take time determining in true democratic fashion the relative values of three commercials for a ‘winner’ to be picked. These concerns about access are not unrelated to the increase since the 1980s of the ENG - electronic news gathering video systems - that made broadcasting from OBUs (outside broadcasting units) more economically viable. Cottle (1995), for example, makes an interesting point in suggesting that the arrival of the more “expansive” ENG format that was portable, lightweight and dependent only on reusable video seemed at first to,

“…afford some opportunity for outside voices and viewpoints to make their case and, depending on editorial juxtaposition, engage the viewpoints of others.” (Cottle, 1995, p. 278)

However, despite the technological opportunities that could mix and match a range of diverse opinions from various citizens across several geographic locations at once, the chosen ENG format, as we have seen,

“…is especially prone to the editorial process in which interviewee statements are severely edited, with clipped statements frequently juxtaposed in a mock contest of selected verbal bites all arranged in accordance with the overall story conceptualization of the news producers.” (Cottle, 1995, p. 285)

There still remains, then, that element of ideological canal digging that structures the programme flow - a feature we have underscored in Fox News and emphasised in our films under scrutiny, most significantly, Mad City (1997). In the case of the former, the audience may feel, because of the sheer speed of coverage, that they have been engaged with a ‘discussion’ that has directly involved interested parties - ranging from the Friends of the Earth, Boeing, to the New York Police Department and the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. However, as Cottle (1995) would observe,

“…such professional judgments have denied the public the possibility of witnessing and listening to engaged and elaborated positions of discursive and rhetorical struggle and as such they have been offered an impoverished resource for understanding and opinion formation.” (Cottle, 1995, p. 285)

It might be, though, that such editorial interventions by the corporate author are more clearly in evidence given the range of formats now available. Just as we can see the jumps, so we can see the gaps. Countering such critical reading places even greater dramaturgical emphasis on the role(s) of the anchor who must attempt to smoothly orchestrate the increased ramble of the programme flow.

While, therefore, the conventional form of the telecast supports orthodox expectations and so assumes authoritative ‘objective’ reporting (propositional), the overcoded (and undercoded) delivery style within the mise-en-scene exposes the performative dimension of the anchor that invites an active often positive response from the viewer. A classic case of deliberate but effective undercoding combined with framing for example, is the uncontested aside by Shepard that quickly and smoothly framed Professor Graber’s citizen group as “anarchist”. Stam (1983) has already underscored how in this respect,

“…television news, then, claims to speak for us…but just as often it deprives us of the right to speak by deluding us into thinking that its discourse is our own. Often it gives us the illusion of social harmony, the ersatz communication of a global village which is overwhelmingly white, male and corporate.” (Stam, 1983, p. 39)

With news programmes so vitally anchored to the role of the presenter, ever-greater attention is paid, therefore, to the delivery of performance - by both media academics and corporate shareholders. Hence, this is some justification for any extended analysis of an anchor’s dual-tone “speech act” (Hallin, 1994; Searle, 1969). As we have discussed in the Fox News examples above - the anchor role must contain both a propositional and a performative content - that is, make a statement about the world and simultaneously invoke or solicit a relationship between speaker and hearer/viewer that both opens ‘dialogue’ about the subject but then narrowly anchors limited ‘agreed’ meaning.

This beguiling transparent aspect of the anchor’s performance is additionally detected in the fraternal exchange between anchors ‘across and through’ the viewer, and in the balance achieved between respect and familiarity with complicit invited guests. In the case of the former our cognitive and emotional judgments and responses are nudged and guided by the carefully paced cross-cutting exchanges that help identify ‘us’ as active listeners who shot-by-shot adopt the assumed role of the listening second anchor being directly and politely addressed by the first. In this process we are literally interpellated as one of the anchors through direct reference to camera by the other. This is all the more evident in the transcription provided above which reveals a form of transparent discourse that - on paper - could not be distinguished from ‘natural’ conversation exchange outside the studio (albeit in the men’s locker-room). It is as if we are just listening in, yet active in anticipating the often engaging and comfortable give-and-take of the exchange.

Lastly, there is a further dramaturgical slant involved that subliminally compares news content (social contest and argument) with the more emotionally satisfying pattern of non-combative discourses that make up the Fox News environment. It is a form of mise-en-scene that, in its scripted affect towards “public reasonableness”, attempts to reproduce that form of spontaneous public discussion on which the democratic agenda is assumed to rest. It is a form that foregrounds mutual engagement, evenhandedness, turn-taking with the power of transmitting information and “clarifying the common world” (Schudson, 1997a).

The fraternal patter is not just to make the news comfortable for advertisers to locate their wares but codifies an ideological benchmark that equates the civil exchange of free ideas between engaged citizens as the basis of democracy. The working comparison is, by weighted implication, with those who choose other means of expressing their opinions by scratching Starbucks doors. The style of transparent exchange, Stam’s (1983) “ersatz communication”, within the Fox Friends simulacrum attempts, therefore, to secure viewerlistener alignment in the often explicit ethos of the programme, thus suggesting, is it not better to be with ‘us’, than with ‘them’? This active response that the studio discourse continually evinces from the audience would give legitimacy both to the broadcaster’s role (through the anchors) and by extension the ideological corporate worldview of the media system that they collectively represent. Thus the off-stage Anti-Capitalist Convergence becomes an anarchist group, by anchor definition. This would be one clear illustrative example - Wag the Dog (1997) provides another - of how, for Glynn (2000),

“Indeed, it can be said with increasing justification that in this electronically networked society, media processes are the primary site of struggle over the power of discourse to constitute meanings in ways that variously serve socio-political interests over and against others.” (Glynn, 2000, p. 232).

This discursive practice, rooted in dramaturgical gesture, creates identifications and empathies with figures from corporate news, entertainment and advertising that then blend fortuitously towards ideological alignment with institutions representing the given status quo. The form of public communication itself assimilates known discourses and practices from entertainment. As Altheide (2002) contests,

“The entertainment format contributes to social definitions and provides a common ground that the advertising industry essentially owns and operates…as audiences are exposed to more of these formats, the logic of advertising, entertainment, and popular culture becomes taken for granted as a “normal” form of communication.” (Altheide, 2002, p. 9).

Altheide is writing in the post-11^th September 2001 context of how mainstream communication patterns and organisations figure strongly in the creation of fear and how this generates and frames a social dramaturgical awareness that first manufactures contest and then fosters apparent security in the form of imagined social communities - one of which, for example, would be Fox Friends. In this important instance, the medium of convivial scripted exchange that weaves interview and conversation styles so invitingly is the actual message.

Considering the use of language, the continued hailing of the assumed audience into an imaginative dialogue with television anchors reading off unseen auto-cues is testimony of the real social and political contest referred to by Glynn (2000), and others, that is in play over these contested terms of description and labeling and how their meanings are anchored (Schiffrin, 1999; Hilliard, 2001; Schiller, 1996; Bourdieu, 1996).

We should also note how, the pattern of the conversational style that casually ascribes often loaded opinions to unidentified third parties (“you know, there was some scepticism expressed by some of the attendees”; “there were a lot of people concerned that it might happen here”; “this morning people who commute…are saying”; “That’s a description that I heard repeatedly.”) is one that also keeps NewsCorp out of the law courts.

Lastly, transposing one language discourse that frames civil rights for citizens into another that openly and pleasantly hails them as consumers is symptomatic of the general trend that deftly equates the fading ideals of the former with the crude commercial imperatives of the latter.

So while the sequence as a whole focuses on the trusted elements of visible drama - contest and battle between opposing forces whether in New York or New Orleans - there is another more virulent and unseen vital contest underpinning the programming agenda. This agenda that frames news events only in terms of contest, and evident in the chosen language of broadcast and internet websites, is all the more intriguing as corporations are personalised in terms of victims of minor or possible attack: how, in the two instances above, for example, Starbucks street doors are damaged and how corporate leaders, in this case CEO Condit of Boeing, are voluntarily and heroically putting themselves “in harms way”.

The ghostly struggle, just off screen but always within earshot - is over certain key definitions on which the Republic turns - ‘individual’, ‘freedom of speech’, and ‘democracy’ - and how those definitions are being anchored and then framed through a rhetoric of structured and rehearsed exchanges to suit the specific purposes of corporate America (Boeing) which confidently assumes, in our example, that, through complicit corporate television, it is already at the “conversation” and hoping others will “join”.

One critical insight, for example at this juncture, would wonder if the five women reported by Connor unfurling a banner on top of a New York building on a wet January afternoon would prefer instead to voice their opinions as citizens to the millions watching Fox News - if they were invited. Instead, condemned to broadcast silence, their unseen arrest provides even more justification for the “strong” police presence as celebrated by Shepard Smith. It also provides a news information hook for a frustrated reporter with no news to tell. It is interesting how the absence of event is positively ascribed to the strong presence of the New York Police Department. Yet within minutes, the same broadcaster allows extended airtime to the chairmen of corporate industry who are “concerned about all of those issues” while inside the security of the Waldorf hotel made ‘safe’ by public tax funds (for an overview of how well Boeing was to profit from the budget windfall to military contractors see Barnes, 2003). The sequence as a whole is worthy of Bourdieu’s (1996) fiery observation that,

“So much emphasis on headlines and so much filling up of precious time with empty air - with nothing or almost nothing - shunts aside relevant news, that is, the information that all citizens ought to have in order to exercise their democratic rights.” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 18)

Hence, the active determining role of the news broadcaster in decidedly shaping the social reality/contest on which it reports, is neatly camouflaged as it rhetorically ‘follows’ the news events ‘live!’. At this point we can defer respectfully to the late Neil Postman (1987) and his general contention that,

“…television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called “disinformation”… Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information, misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing… In saying this I do not mean to imply that television deliberately aims to deprive Americans of coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.” (Postman, 1987, p.109)

It is the main contention of this book to argue, however, that what for Postman (1987) might have been an unconscious element in television programming in the 1980s - an unfortunate outcome of historical and technological forces or the unconscious ideology at work - is now, more than ever, a consciously determined strategy/rhetoric that subscribes to a serious political and ideological agenda. It is an agenda driven, of course, by the invisible market, that landscape of ‘natural’, neutral and unfettered freedoms as permitted, though, only for the corporate few.

It is also an agenda, however, that actively creates the scope and powerfully arbitrates to anchor meanings that make up that social reality of on-going contest. In this context, citizens who may have no other alternative public avenue of direct expression outside the television studio that stage-manages the leading social discourses might very well emerge on rooftops unfurling a simple banner. That social reality is one of fractured social groups, real but manufactured conflicts, orchestrated fear and increasing frantic debate that passes for earnest discussion, or, in its most extreme form, ‘anarchism’ that must then be met with the full force of the law (Mad City, 1998).

So the sometimes easy and elitist tendency to frame ‘shallow’ tabloid form within the discourse of entertainment runs a serous risk of missing its determined rhetorical function that has a much wider and socially significant purpose than just providing infotainment as distraction from serious issues. The careful commercial appropriation of politically coded language - “we report, you decide”, “conversation”, “participate”, “discussion”, even “forum” itself, is of vital loaded importance in the context of a political culture founded on the associate link connecting voice, individual and power - and as condensed in the provisions in the First Amendment which Fox News thinks is so important. The most troubling aspect of this process is how the news organisations themselves - as corporate institutions - claim individual rights in line with free speech allowance, yet crucially deny their very active role as social actors in the real events as reported so objectively and, it appears, transparently.

The Interview - Implications of the Loss of Fairness

The concern over limited access for the diversity of voices has become a particularly significant aspect of debates that question the scope and depth of American news journalism in general (Sparrow, 1999). These debates have acutely sharpened in the wake of the 1987 FCC decision to suspend, it seems permanently, the Fairness Doctrine (Chapter Five). We are reminded that President Reagan’s veto that upheld the FCC decision was in direct opposition to the wishes of the people’s representatives in both the House and the Senate. In keeping with criticisms at the time, it has created the form of skewed news delivery of the kind we have sampled and analysed above. For example, in agreement with Croteau and Hoynes (2000),

“Since the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC no longer requires stations to seriously address issues of public interest. If stations do address public issues, they can now create entire program schedules that communicate a single viewpoint without ever seriously considering alternative opinions. One possible result is the further retrenchment of political division.” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p. 100)

Our limited but telling example from Fox News is evidence of how such a single corporate viewpoint or ideological narrative angle can operate subtextually across a range of apparently different genre discourses in a way that has direct influence on the structure and content of public events that then become the profitable subject of news coverage. In this respect the analysis above concurs with similar recent findings (Stein, 2001).

To counter such positions, Fox News continually foregrounds the competitive ethos of public debate - but only in relation to the contest for market share between broadcasters. Within this determined discourse that positions Fox as the people’s underdog, Fox often claims a centrist objective position by continually presenting the commercial press (even including CNN) as biased. Yet,

“Contrary to what Ailes and other right-wing media critics say, the agenda at CNN and its fellow mainstream outlets is not liberal or conservative, but staunchly centrist. The perspective they value most are those of the bi-partisan establishment middle, the same views that make up the mainstream corporate consensus that media publishers and executive are a part of.” (Ackermann, 2001, http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html , 30.01.2003)

Behind the dramaturgy of news competition, however, there remains the main ideological project which, in times of permanent states of high alert in America, keeps the political agenda firmly to the Right.

This selected but detailed account of rudimentary Fox News reports underscores certain key theoretical assumptions that underpin this thesis as a whole. In essence it has been assumed that, after Gramsci (1971), the corporate mass media are part of an ongoing struggle over meanings that constitute social reality. Through continual consensual approval, they are able to determine, to their own economic and ideological advantage and those social elites that own them, the ongoing uneven distribution of power and influence within that reality.

Since the social reality - and its control - is largely determined by the ownership and distribution of mass media artefacts, securing such consent is, by nature, an ongoing struggle over the meaning of such signs - whether they be live reports covering the World Economic Forum, the Super Bowl or, with reference to another manufactured contest, the search for weapons of mass destruction.

It is in respect of this last example that we conclude the chapter with an account of News Corp’s healthy financial performance for 2002, which the executives of Fox News, with the complicit assistance of the White House, enjoyed

Part Three

USA 2002 - NewsCorp Finances, the White House and War

Since the attacks on Washington, D.C. and New York of 11^th September 2001, Fox has been a spectacular success with audiences, surpassing its main rival CNN in the ratings for the first time in January 2003 - apparently a beneficiary of the changing national mood post-11^th September 2001, and the invasion of Iraq that seemed to follow. Financial reports clearly indicated the major reliance on the American market across all media and how, television - that included Fox News - remained the most profitable sector. In addition, and in comparison with its market rivals, the NewsCorp portfolio also indicated a highly stable financial situation during this time of major insecurity that witnessed a substantial downturn in advertising expenditure across the industry.

As an insight of the continued pressures in advertising, a May 2002 U.S. News & World Report entitled Make-or-break TV reported a record 13% drop in upfront advertising revenues in 2001 that then increased the 2002 competitive edge where,

“…things could be worse…although a down economy means many advertisers can’t afford to buy TV time, it also means many others can’t afford not to. Despite in roads made by cable channels, broadcast TV still delivers the biggest and best quality audiences.” (Streisand, 2002, p. 38)

While market share prices varied wildly, particularly at Warners/AOL and Viacom, NewsCorp maintained a healthy balance between revenues and company valuations at the end of the year 2002.

The most dramatic and visible reason ascribed to the general economic downturn by the mainstream media was, of course, the air attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11^th September 2001.

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