Murdoch's World by David Folkenflik

good time, dining and drinking, without guilt, among the same Fox News staffers who had been told not to talk to me for more than a year. Years later, when my wife andI married, the Fox News PR team sent over an exquisite bottle of champagne from a 2002 vintage—specifically picked by Brian Lewis, Briganti pointed out, to honor a prize I won for the Rivera story. Nice touch. It was a shame to have to return it.
    As the campaign against Al Qaida and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan yielded to the drive to invade Iraq in 2003,Fox News adopted a pro-war tenor that overrode that of many of the reports of their reporters in the field. Anchor Neil Cavuto mocked a professor he deemed an “obnoxious, pontificating jerk,” a “self-absorbed, condescending imbecile,” and an “Ivy League intellectual Lilliputian,” for criticizing his broadcast as setting aside journalistic traditions of objectivity for outright nationalism.
    â€œAm I slanted and biased? You damn well bet I am, professor. I’m more in favor of a system that lets me say what I’m saying here rather than one who would be killing me for doing the same thing over there,” Cavuto said. “You say I wear my biases on my sleeve? Better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work.” As if to prove his point, during an antiwar protest in Manhattan, the Fox News ticker that wrapped around the front of the News Corp headquarters switched from headlines to jeers against the demonstrators.
    At times the network’s publicity staffers turned their sights on their own former colleagues. When Fox host Paula Zahn moved to CNN, Zimmerman said it was like“putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse.” Ailes himself told the New York Times ,“I could have put a dead raccoon on the air and gotten a better rating.”
    At another point,I noticed that Fox News had fallen into the habit of wishing people well in ways that conveyed the precise opposite. In 2004, then MSNBC host (and former ESPN and Fox Sports anchor) Keith Olbermann criticized Bill O’Reilly, drawing this retort from Brian Lewis: “Since he stopped reading sports scores, Keith has attracted fewer viewers than a test pattern, and his career has been nothing short of a train wreck. We pity his tortured soul and wishhim all the best .” (All italics mine.) In 2005, when CNN experienced a mild ratings boost under a new president, Jonathan Klein, Fox’s Briganti replied: “Our focus is on beating the broadcast networks. We wish Jon well in his battle for second place with MSNBC.” That same year, Ted Turner denounced Fox, triggering this: “Ted is understandably bitter, having lost his ratings, his network, and now his mind. We wish him well .”
    The steady stream of cruelty had become funny by sheer force of repetition. Ailes sometimes took part in crafting the put-downs.
    On occasion, Fox News’s PR team aimed its jabs at current colleagues.Laurie Dhue, a Fox anchor who had complained she was not receiving sufficient press coverage, mistook a junior Fox publicity assistant for a young fan seeking an autograph at a black tie event in Washington. Dhue would be taught a lesson. Among Fox’s guests at that radio and TV correspondents’ dinner was Anne Schroeder, a reporter who wrote gossip features for the Washington Post . She sat at a table that included John Moody, a senior news executive, and Chris Wallace, the host of the Sunday political talk show Fox News Sunday . At an after-party, Schroeder witnessed Dhue dancing energetically—and raising some eyebrows among Fox executives.
    Schroeder’s later story for the Post reported that “theFox News babes were in high spirits—especially Laurie Dhue.” The item mentioned Dhue’s misunderstanding over the autograph and continued: “The sultry anchor boogied the night away on the dance floor, bumping into numerous people in