Fox News

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Fox News Channel's slogan is "We Report, You Decide"
Fox News Channel's slogan is "We Report, You Decide"

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

Launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers, the nascent network quickly rose to prominence in the late 1990s as it started taking market share away from competitor CNN.

Although Fox asserts that it is more objective and factual than other American networks with its slogans "We Report, You Decide" and "Fair and Balanced", numerous critics claim that the network has a conservative bias.

Contents

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History

Rupert Murdoch established Fox News to counter a news media that, in his opinion, was dominated by liberals. [1] Murdoch had significant experience with cable news after starting the Sky News rolling news service in the United Kingdom. Polls showed that a significant percentage of Americans believed that the media was too liberal. Murdoch saw a business opportunity in providing a news network that was "Fair and Balanced", trademarking the slogan with a sub-header of "We Report, You Decide", which was meant to separate the opinion side of Fox from the news side.

In February 1996, after Roger Ailes (who would later be the president of Fox News) was relieved of duties at America's Talking, in preparation for conversion of the network to MSNBC, Murdoch called Ailes to start the network. A group of Ailes loyalists who followed him throughout the NBC empire joined him at Fox. From there, they proceeded to select space in New York and worked individuals through five months of grueling 14 hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before launch.

At launch, only ten million households were able to watch Fox News, and most notably Fox News was not on the cable systems of the key media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. Fox News had to invite media writers to its launch to write reviews about the coverage. Media writers generally found the news programming of Fox at launch to be down the middle, if somewhat shallow. The rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20 minute single topic shows like Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics surrounded by news headlines. During the evening, Fox's opinion shows, The O'Reilly Factor (then called The O'Reilly Report), a show with Catherine Crier, and Hannity & Colmes, were judged by many media writers to be generally conservative, with O'Reilly being too harsh on some guests, like Barry McCaffrey, and Catherine Crier being too soft on her first guest, Rush Limbaugh.

To get cable systems to take Fox News, Ailes paid systems up to $11 per subscriber in subsidy to take up the network. This contrasted with past practice, in which cable operators pay stations carriage fees for their programming. Ailes also used his connections with New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to get Fox News on the New York cable system, which was owned by Time Warner. When Time Warner bought out Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, a federal anti-trust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to Time Warner's own CNN. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news network, instead of Fox News. Fox News claimed that this violated an agreement to carry Fox News, and persuaded Mayor Giuliani to carry Fox News, and Bloomberg Television, on two underutilized city-owned cable channels, which he did.

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

For more information on the creation of Fox News, see Scott Collins Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, ISBN 1591840295.

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Management

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

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Programming

Fox News Channel Iraq war coverage
Enlarge
Fox News Channel Iraq war coverage

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

The following is the usual weekday lineup (as of Jan. 2005, all times Eastern):

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

Fox News Sunday currently airs on many Fox affiliates and is similar in format to other Sunday morning political discussion programs.

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Personalities

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Former personalities

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Ratings

Fox News currently leads the cable news market, earning higher ratings than its chief competitors CNN and MSNBC combined by average viewership. Measured by unique viewers, however, Fox is bested by CNN which, during the election season, earned 11% greater numbers of individual P2+ viewers. This is primarily due to Fox's somewhat longer duration "talk" programs which cause viewers to tune in for longer periods as compared to CNN's generally shorter news segments.

The BBC reported that Fox News saw its profits double during the Iraq conflict, due in part to what the report called "patriotic" coverage of the war. By some reports, at the height of the conflict, they enjoyed as much as a 300% increase in viewership, averaging 3.3 million viewers daily ([2]).

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

In April 2005, however, CNN sent out a press release stating that Fox's viewership of adults betwen the ages of 25 and 54 had dropped over a period of six months since the peak of the November 2004 elections (to a total drop of over 58% [3], [4]), though Fox still held eight of the ten most-watched nightly cable news shows, with The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes coming in first and second places, respectively. And since then Fox's ratings have surged. [5]

News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, has campaigned against plans by Nielsen to change the method used to compile ratings from the traditional 'diary' method to the electronic 'people meter'. A longstanding criticism of the diary method of compiling ratings is that consumers may misrepresent their viewing behavior in order to 'vote' for prefered programming such as PBS or Fox News. A 'grassroots' campaign financed and organized by Fox Don't Count Us Out has alleged that the new method of compiling ratings is biased against minority viewers pointing to dramatic falls in the viewing figures of network TV programs aimed at minority audiences. Supporters of Nielsen, including Jesse Jackson, have noted that the Nielsen sample actually over-represents minority viewers and that the dramatic falls in viewing of broadcast programming are matched by a rise in the ratings for cable programming, in particular Black Entertainment Television [6]

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Controversies and allegations of bias

See also: Media bias, Propaganda model

Fox News asserts that it is more objective and factual than other American networks. Its self-promotion includes the phrases "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report, You Decide". However, numerous critics claim that the network has a conservative bias and tailors its news to support the Republican Party. Although most critics do not claim that all Fox News reporting is slanted, most allege that bias at Fox News is systemic, and implemented to both target and build a right-wing audience. The channel is often regarded by international audiences as primarily being a propaganda vehicle for the Bush administration, as it not only promotes advocacy of such things as the US invasion of Iraq, but also attempts to explain and advocate the broader neoconservative worldview behind those actions.

Many media commentators and competitors have alleged that Fox News' reporting is characterized by right-wing editorials disguised as news, and frequently refer to Fox News as the "Faux News Network", the "Republican News Network", "GOP TV", "Fear and Bias", or "Unfair and Unbalanced". Critics of Fox News point to the following as evidence of bias:

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Ownership and management

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Reports, polls and studies

    white male Republican conservative
Hume (Fox) 93% 91% 89% 71%
Blitzer (CNN) 93% 86% 57% 32%
  • A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, in the Winter 2003-2004 issue of Political Science Quarterly, reported that viewers of the Fox Network local affiliates or Fox News were more likely than viewers of other news networks to hold three views which the authors labeled as misperceptions:[12] (PDF),
    • 67% of FOX viewers believed that the "US has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization" (Compared with 56% for CBS, 49% for NBC, 48% for CNN, 45% for ABC, 16% for both NPR and PBS). However, the belief that "Iraq was directly involved in September 11" was held by 33% of CBS viewers and only 24% of FOX viewers.
    • 33% of FOX viewers believed that the "US has found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" "since the war ended". (Compared with 23% for CBS, 20% for both CNN and NBC, 19% for ABC and 11% for both NPR and PBS)
    • 35% of FOX viewers believed that "the majority of people [in the world] favour the US having gone to war" with Iraq. (Compared with 28% for CBS, 27% for ABC, 24% for CNN, 20% for NBC, 5% for both NPR and PBS)
Fox viewers were unique in that those who paid greater attention to news were moderately more likely to have these misperceptions than those who paid less or no attention to news.
  • A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2005 found that, in covering the Iraq War in 2004, 73% of Fox News stories included editorial opinions, compared with 29% on MSNBC and 2% on CNN. The same report found Fox less likely than CNN to present multiple points of view. On the other hand, it found Fox more transparent about its sources[13]. Full report
  • A December 2004 study, entitled "A Measure of Media Bias", by Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri.[14] In this study, the researchers investigated congressional citations of think tanks and other policy groups. Based on the scores of members of congress assigned by Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the researchers estimated the ADA scores of the think tanks and other policy groups that these members of congress cited. Based on journalists' citations of these think tanks and other policy groups, the researchers then estimated the ADA scores of 20 major American news outlets.
The researchers omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor, and focused on the news stories of the outlets. The researchers ignored instances of legislators or journalists citing actions taken by policy groups (focusing instead on citations regarding the perceived views of the policy group), citations that were performed for the sole purpose of rebutting the policy groups' views, or when an ideological label was assigned to the policy group. The purpose of this was to focus on instances where "the legislator or journalist cited the think tank as if it were a disinterested expert on the topic at hand."
Based on this methodology, the researchers estimated Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume to have an ADA score of 39.7. This places Special Report to the right of the average American voter, who the researchers estimated to have an ADA score of 50.1. (Higher ADA scores indicate a liberal slant, lower scores a conservative slant.)
Out of the twenty news outlets investigated, Special Report was the fifth closest to the center, following PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC's Good Morning America. (The Drudge Report came in fourth, but the researchers believed this to be an anomaly.) This study lends support to allegations that American media as a whole has a liberal bias, since, aside from Special Report, only one other news outlet had an estimated ADA score less than 50.1 (the Washington Times, with a score of 35.4). The study also lends support to allegations that American media has bias towards the center, since only one outlet, the Wall Street Journal, with a score of 85.1, had a score that was less than the average Republican member of Congress or greater than the average Democratic member of Congress.
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Criticisms of on-air conservative personalities

A number of Fox News Channel' anchors, hosts and personalities are self-professed right-wing conservatives, and several others are considered such by the channel's critics.

  • Managing editor and host Brit Hume is a contributor to the conservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard.
  • Daytime anchor David Asman previously worked at The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Manhattan Institute, a conservative thinktank.
  • Weekend Live host Tony Snow is a conservative columnist, radio host, and former chief speechwriter for the first Bush administration. He also hosts his own show, The Tony Snow Show, on Fox News Radio.
  • Primetime co-host Sean Hannity (paired with Alan Colmes on-air) is one of Fox News' openly partisan anchors, the voice of the political right on Hannity and Colmes; Hannity is also prominent in conservative talk radio, second only to Rush Limbaugh in terms of listeners, and went on tour for George W. Bush before the 2004 election.
  • One of the most well-known personalities is the popular Bill O'Reilly, who hosts the O'Reilly Factor; O'Reilly often faces criticism from the left over a perceived pro-(Iraq)war, right-wing slant in his opinion program. O'Reilly himself maintains that he is politically independent (chiefly due to libertarian positions on social issues like homosexuality and marijuana legislation). Some people accuse O'Reilly for frequently using incendiary, emotive, or nationalist "rhetoric" toward those who hold disagreeing positions, such as accusing Senator Dick Durbin of "slamming America" and "condemning his own country" over Durbin's criticism of the conditions at the United States' Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba. Some despise O'Reilly philosophically, because he labels himself "a traditionalist". Others despise him personally, because his programs (Radio and TV) are confrontational, or because of his methodology. O'Reilly himself juxtaposes that his show is not so much "news", but a news analysis program.[15]
  • John Gibson's afternoon block of news coverage, "The Big Story", is frequently cited as an example of what some people see Fox News as deliberately blurring the lines between objective reporting and opinion/editorial programming. Gibson gained notoriety immediately after the 2000 presidential election controversy for his advocating the burning of all ballots involved in the election dispute once George W. Bush was sworn into office: "Is this a case where knowing the facts actually would be worse than not knowing? I mean, should we burn those ballots, preserve them in amber, or shred them? George Bush is going to be president. And who needs to know that he's not a legitimate president?" [16]
  • Business anchor Neil Cavuto, who is also Fox News' vice president of business news and a current member of the network's executive committee, has been described as a "Bush apologist" by critics [17] after conducting an allegedly deferential interview with President George W. Bush [18] wherein Cavuto told Bush that domestic lack of support for the partial privatization of Social Security was due to Americans being "distracted" by Michael Jackson's child molestation trial. Cavuto has been a syndicated columnist on both Townhall.com [19] and NewsMax.com [20].
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Criticisms of on-air liberal personalities

Alan Colmes is touted by Fox as "a hard-hitting liberal" ([21]), but is dismissed by many on the left as being a political moderate too weak to provide an effective balance for self-professed "arch-conservative" Sean Hannity. As executive producer of Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity is also Colmes' de facto boss ([22]). Liberal viewers have long found Colmes' quiet, deferential style infuriating, particularly in contrast to the outspoken Hannity; and Colmes himself has sometimes taken more right-leaning positions, such as supporting Rudolph Guiliani for mayor of New York City and defending Mississippi Senator Trent Lott after the latter made racially suspect remarks at the 100th birthday party for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. It hasn't helped Colmes with his liberal critics either that he has also defended Fox's "fair and balanced" slogan as accurate, or that he has been praised by prominent conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and was once chosen as the favorite liberal by posters on a Free Republic forum. Liberal commentator Al Franken lambasted Colmes in his popular book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, accusing him of refusing to ask tough questions during debates and neglecting to challenge alleged erroneous claims made by Hannity or his guests (Franken even jokingly suggested that Colmes is a whipping boy who's forced to do odd jobs around the Fox News studios).

The similar term is described as Fox News liberal. The term is used among Democrats and liberals in the U.S. to refer to those commentators and politicians who hold themselves out as liberals and/or Democrats, yet do one or more of the following:

  • They often agree with their conservative and/or Republican opposite numbers on TV talk shows or in legislative bodies on various issues and positions.
  • They show no hesitation to distance themselves from and criticize their fellow Democrats and liberals, especially to predominantly conservative audiences;
  • They present weak arguments in favor of liberal/Democratic positions, and refuse to debate or easily succumb to conservative/Republican arguments.
  • They base arguments on dubious claims made by conservatives and Republicans, thereby suggesting that those are valid liberal/Democratic positions.

The term is similar to Democrat In Name Only (DINO). It is based on the belief, held by many on the left, that the Fox News Channel has a conservative/Republican bias, and that many of the Fox News commentators who claim to be liberal are straw men hired to ineffectively present liberal viewpoints.

Susan Estrich, Dick Morris, Juan Williams, Ed Koch, Pat Caddell as well as former Senator Zell Miller are also noted as examples of Fox commentators noted primarily for their links to past Democratic campaigns, have also been called Fox news liberals for exhibiting similar tendencies and appearing to care more that the conservatives like them and that they continue to appear on television than defending liberalism and the Democratic Party. In Miller's case the label is almost certainly a misnomer since Miller for his entire career as a public official always presented himself a moderate or conservative Democrat. Out of the pre-mentioned names, Estrich is the only one actually presented by Fox as a "liberal" or "democrat". The rest are simply "political commentators".

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Other criticisms

  • Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, a documentary film on Fox News by Robert Greenwald, makes allegations of bias in Fox News by interviewing a number of former employees who discuss the company's practices. For example, Frank O'Donnell, a former employee identified as "Fox News producer", says: "We were stunned, because up until that point, we were allowed to do legitimate news. Suddenly, we were ordered from the top to carry [...] Republican, right-wing propaganda", after being told what to say about Ronald Reagan. O'Donnell actually worked for Washington, D.C. Fox affiliate WTTG, which while a local affiliate, is not the Fox News Channel cable network. Fox News has always stressed that affiliates are separate entities from Fox News Channel, and Fox News has no editorial oversight of any Fox affiliate. The network made an official response and a review of selected employees featured in the film and their employment (or non-employment) with Fox News.
  • A news article in October 2004 by Carl Cameron, chief political correspondent of Fox News, containing three fabricated quotes attributed to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The quotes included: "Women should like me! I do manicures", "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great?" and "I'm metrosexual [Bush's] a cowboy". Fox News retracted the story and apologized, citing a "jest" that became published through "fatigue and bad judgement, not malice."
  • An opinion piece on the Hutton Inquiry decision, in which John Gibson said the BBC had "a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest" and that the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, "insisted on air that the Iraqi Army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American Military" [23]. In reviewing viewer complaints, Ofcom (the United Kingdom's statutory broadcasting regulator) ruled that Fox News had breached the program code in three areas: "respect for truth", "opportunity to take part", and "personal view programmes opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence". Fox News admitted that Gilligan had not actually said the words that John Gibson appeared to attribute to him; OfCom rejected the claim that it was intended to be a paraphrase. (see Ofcom complaint, response and ruling).

In June 2004, CEO Roger Ailes responded to some criticism with rebuttal in an online column for the Wall Street Journal ([24]), claiming that Fox's critics intentionally confuse opinion shows such as The O'Reilly Factor with regular news coverage. Ailes claimed that Fox News has broken stories which turned out harmful to Republicans and the Republican Party, stating "Fox News is the network that broke George W. Bush's DUI four days before the election" as an example. The story on Bush's drunk driving record was broken by then-Fox affiliate WPXT in Portland, Maine.

In a Wall Street Journal Europe op-ed published on May 20, 2005, London bureau chief Scott Norvell wrote: "Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly". [25], [26] However, the quote is used in the context of Norvell's criticism of a rival, state-funded broadcaster.

More recently, in 2005, as 4,000 people in Detroit paid their final respects to civil rights hero Rosa Parks during the four hours of her funeral ceremony on November 2, Fox News devoted just 23 minutes of air time to live coverage, compared with 108 minutes of coverage on CNN and 100 on MSNBC. [27]

In place of Rosa Parks's funeral Fox News featured (among other things) an extensive discussion, complete with visuals, of the top-five ranked celebrities from In Touch Weekly magazine's "Best Cleavage in Hollywood" poll. [28]

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Trademark disputes

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

In December 2003, the Independent Media Institute, which publishes the Alternet online magazine, brought a petition before the United States Patent and Trademark Office seeking the cancellation of Fox's trademark in the phrase "Fair & Balanced". [29] The petition argued that the phrase was so widely used by others as to have no particular association with Fox, and that Fox's use of the phrase was "notoriously misdescriptive of [Fox]'s presentation of news content". [30] As of April 2005, the proceeding was still pending.

In 2002, a small website called Agitproperties.com began selling T-shirts and other merchandise with a "FAUX News" logo parodying Fox's logo. The products included one that used "We Distort, You Comply" as a parody of Fox's slogan "We Report, You Decide". Lawyers for Fox, charging an infringement of Fox's rights, demanded that the company cease selling all such merchandise and threatened litigation if Agitproperties did not comply. [31] As of April 2005, the "FAUX News" products are no longer listed on the Agitproperties website.

In 2005, MSNBC began using the new slogan "Fair and Accurate".

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International transmission

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

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Australia

Fox News Channel is broadcast on the three major Pay-TV providers, Austar, Optus Television and Foxtel. Foxtel is 25% owned by News Corporation. Near it's beginning in this market it had some local programming, including a John Laws current affairs program in place of "Fox & Friends". This is no longer the case.

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Brazil

Since 2002 Fox News has been broadcast to Brazil, but the commercials are replaced with weather forecasts (except for their own ads). It is broadcasted by Sky Brazil (satellite) and NET (cable), both owned by News Corporation.

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Canada

On December 14, 2000, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved Fox News Canada on behalf of the Global Television Network, for broadcast. Fox News Canada was to be a domestic Canadian version of Fox News. [32] The channel, or specialty television service, was never implemented by Fox, and the deadline for commencement of the service expired on November 24, 2004.

On June 18, 2003, the Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), an organization representing approximately 90 cable companies in Canada, applied to add Fox News, ESPN, HBO, and other non-domestic programming to the CRTC's Lists of Eligible Satellite Services on a digital basis. In their application the CCTA duly noted that, absent a change in CRTC policy, some of the channels were likely to be ineligible for addition to the lists as some were partially or totally competitive with licensed Canadian programming. Some Canadian channels additionally might hold exclusive rights. In a lengthy response, the CRTC stated that "the Commission considers that CCTA has not raised sufficient question as to the validity of the existing policy, or sufficient argument or evidence as to the benefits of its proposed approach, to warrant a policy review at this time" and noted that "CCTA has not provided the information generally required for the Commission to consider requests to add services to the Lists. Accordingly, the Commission is not in a position to examine whether it would be appropriate to authorize for distribution any of the specific services noted in CCTA’s request" ([33]).

The CCTA applied on April 15, 2004 solely to add Fox News, along with the NFL Network. [34] CCTA's acting president Michael Hennessy said that the previous "bulk approach... ...was just too big", adding it raised "significant issues" with respect to broadcast rights and competition with existing domestic services ([35]) On November 18, 2004 the CRTC announced that a digital license would be granted to Fox News ([36]). In its proposal, Fox News stated, with reference to Fox News Canada, that "Fox News does not intend to implement this service and therefore will not meet the extended deadline to commence operations" ([37]). On December 16, 2004, Rogers Communications became the first Canadian cable or satellite provider to broadcast Fox News, with other companies following suit within the next several days.

The CRTC's previous refusal to grant Fox News a license had been contested by some Canadians, as well as American fans of the channel, who believed the decision to be politically motivated.

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United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland

Fox News is also carried in Britain and Ireland, with global weather forecasts instead of most advertisements, by the British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) satellite television network, in which News Corporation holds a 38 percent stake. It is a "sister channel" to BSkyB's Sky News, however Sky is obliged by law to uphold a neutral editorial stance. Fox News is usually broadcast as an encrypted channel but during major news stories it may be broadcast Free to air on Sky News Active.

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New Zealand

Fox News is carried during the fouth-rated PRIME network's nighttime shut-down, and is available on terrestrial broadcast and through SKY Satellite paid television. Because of their position on the date line, New Zealanders only see Fox News' early to mid-morning programming. Like other foreign markets, global weather forecasts play instead of all bar PRIME advertising (temperatures are presented in degrees Celsius).

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Other countries

Fox News Channel is also carried in more than 40 countries including Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, Grenada, Germany, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, New Guinea, Panama, Philippines, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela, mostly through News Corporation-owned cable and satellite systems.

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External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News"
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