“We’ve got some explaining to do”: The hypocrisy of Shep Smith, Fox and 24 hour news.

It is odd despite the everyday nature of 24 hours news and the mass live broadcast  public murder/suicide of  September11, we remain shocked when ugly life happens in front of us. The latest outbreak of ugly life outrage occurred today, when Fox News apologised for showing a suicide from a live car chase in Arizona.

Shep Smith was the on air man providing explanation and context for Fox News viewers in the god voice from the point of view of the TV helicopter. As rhe chase ended on a dirt road, the hinted man went berserk  He staggered around like a hunted deer in the spotlights fleeing from police but unable to escape the glare of the helicopter.  Clearly cornered, this might have been the moment to end live coverage and let ;police do the job. Instead the camera kept rolling while Smith struggled with the interpretation for his viewers. “I would just- he is looking rather erratic, isn’t he?,” said Smith sounding less godlike by the second.

While Smith waited for re-assurance from somewhere, his filled pauses of ums and dunnos and oh mys questioned what was happening. Both cornered men were increasingly out of options. “Well, it looks like he’s a little disoriented or something…” Smith suggested about the other, desperate to re-assure viewers this could never happen to them "...It’s always possible he could be on something.” While Smith invented the news, the cameras rolled on.

Utterly helpless and hopeless, the man reached for a gun and killed himself. After a second, the video jerks back to the studio. There is the strange sight of Smith issuing repeated cries “get off” for six seconds. Each call is more urgent than the last, until he shouts one final “GET OFF IT”. He turns away from the camera before they finally break for an ad claiming to be for “mesothelioma families” - Call Now 1-800-444-Meso - but is actually for lawyers.

When he returned Smith didn’t apologise for the fake ad but there was extraordinary grovelling for airing the suicide footage. “We’ve got some explaining to do,” began Smith. With the “we” Smith spread the blame across the organisation. “While we were taking that car chase and showing it to you live, when the guy pulled out of the vehicle, they went on five second delay. So that’s why I didn’t talk for about ten seconds,” he said. “We created a five second delay as if you were to bleep back your DVR five seconds, that’s what we did with the picture we were showing you. So that if we would see in the studio five seconds before you did, so that if anything went horribly wrong, we’d be able to cut away from it without subjecting you it.” Smith paused before adding “And we really messed up.”

The mess up was not only the suicide but the strange editing error that followed immediately after it (36 seconds into the video) that makes a double-voiced Shep say incoherently “I am all very sorry”. Shep said the footage “didn’t belong on TV” but he didn’t explain why. Instead he worried about the internal systems that failed to keep the content out. “We took every precaution, we knew how to keep that from being on TV,” he said. “And I personally apologise to you that is what happened. “

Looking to the side rather than direct into the camera, Shep continued: “Sometimes we see a lot of things we don’t let get to you, because it is not time appropriate, it’s insensitive, it’s just wrong. “ He turned back to face the camera. “And that was wrong. And that won’t happen again on my watch and I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll update you on that guy and how that went down tonight on the Fox Report.” Smith repeated he was sorry and then changed his voice to uplift for the next story: “Now, the attack on…” The show must go on.

A lot of people weren’t going to wait for the Fox report or Shep's watch to see “how it went down.” His audience protection argument might have worked 10 years ago but not any more. It wouldn't take long for someone to send the footage viral. Gawker were quick off the mark with a link with caution to the original footage via Buzzfeed as well as the strange apology.

The first Gawker commenter picks up an obvious problem: “I'm confused. If they went to 10 second  delay, how did the suicide end up on screen anyway? I don't understand Shep's explanation,” Scout’s Honour said. It was five seconds not ten, but the point holds up. Fox News overplayed its hand while Shep struggled and while it recovered in one second, it took the host six seconds to realise they had recovered. In panic, Shep did not realise for five seconds, someone has pressed “dump” button out of the broadcast. He was shouting at the delayed footage.

It was a category error on several levels that asked many questions of Fox and 24 hour news. Car chases are popular time sinks for the networks and easy to follow by helicopter.  When a chase unfolded on air in 2009, Smith quipped on air about the energiser bunny and how he had enjoyed this type of entertainment for many years. So after Buzzfeed, Gawker and others quickly pounced on the mistake, it was surprising to hear several journalists blame the messenger. The Columbia Journalism Review tweeted, “Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?” while Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa asked “Why is Buzzfeed sharing a suicide video?”

Al Tomkins in Poynter answered both questions saying the Fox hypocrisy deserved to be given the widest audience . Tomkins ask for the guidelines for broadcasting chases. Are they prepared to air the worst possible outcome from an unfolding story? What outcomes are they not willing to air? Why? How do they know know the worst possible outcome will not occur?   Broadcasters will ignore Tomkins' inconvenient questions about motivations and consequences and show them for the same reason they show the 1-800-444-Meso ads: They make money.

Tompkins acknowledged chase coverage could be is useful for people near the scene. But his unspoken argument was that they served mostly commercial ends. “These are humans involved, struggling with their lives as we transform them into “stories,” he said. “They are humans, they are not ratings points.” But as long as there are ratings points, we will have to put up with the occasional pious homily about live deaths.

Glenn Beck forced to backtrack after attacking religions

American far-right television personality Glenn Beck has spent the last few weeks in the unfamiliar role of backtracking from earlier espoused positions. Beck’s provocative and confrontational views on Fox News, internet sites and syndicated radio stations have made him a hero to conservatives especially since Obama came to power. He commands audiences of 2.3 million to his 5pm cable show making him as the New York Times said “one of the most powerful media voices for the nation’s conservative populist anger.”

However he took a step too far for his base earlier this month. On 2 March Beck told listeners of his radio show they should "run as fast as [they] can" from any church that preached "social or economic justice" because those were code words for Communism and Nazism.

As Amy Sullivan wrote in Time, Beck probably thought he was tweaking a few crunchy religious liberals who didn't listen to the show anyway. But he was little prepared for the reaction he did get. As Sullivan puts it, “instead he managed to outrage Christians in most mainline Protestant denominations, African-American congregations, Hispanic churches, and Catholics--who first heard the term ‘social justice’ in papal encyclicals and have a little something in their tradition called Catholic social teaching."

Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners a network of progressive Christians is calling for a boycott of Beck’s Fox News program. He said Beck perverted Jesus' message when he urged Christians last week to leave churches that preach social and economic justice. Wallis says 20,000 people have responded to the boycott. "He wants us to leave our churches, but we should leave him," Wallis said. "When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor, you don't want to hear about economic justice."

Peg Chamberlin, President of the National Council of Churches of Christ, was one of many religious leaders outraged by Beck’s views. Writing in Huffpo she said it was nothing short of a call for his listeners to disregard central tenets of their faith because they do not conform to his political ideology. “He is advocating that they abandon the full Gospel message in favour of a hollow idol, and he is doing so for worldly gain,” wrote Chamberlin. “His statements cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.”

There is little danger of that happening and it is par for the course for someone to challenge any utterance of Beck’s. But this time it is hurting as the challenges are coming from his own side of politics. Mormon scholars in Beck's church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in interviews he seemed ignorant of just how central social justice teaching was to Mormonism. Philip Barlow, the Arrington Professor of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, said “A lot of Latter-day Saints would think that Beck was asking them to leave their own church.”

However Sarah Pulliam Bailey warns against getting carried away by the size of the reaction against Beck. Writing at Getreligion.org, she calls it a “sweeping generalisation” and said many conservative Christians were comfortable with Beck’s remarks. She said media were making out there was a wide chorus of criticism “when in reality (drumroll please) Jim Wallis is calling for a boycott,” she said. “I can’t help but wonder if we’d ever see a headline like “Christian Leader Calls for Rachel Maddow Boycott.”

Yet very few have come forward to defend Beck. Perhaps unsurprisingly one of the few voices of support was from fellow extremist Jerry Falwell Jnr, an evangelical leader in the mould of his controversial father. Falwell said those pastors who preach economic and social justice were “trying to twist the gospel to say the gospel supported socialism. Falwell said Jesus taught that people should give to the poor and support widows, but he never said that we should elect a government that would take money from a neighbour's hand and give it to the poor. "If we all did as Jesus did when he helped the poor, we wouldn't need the government," Falwell said.

But social justice is a tenet of mainstream faiths and has been promoted by many respected religious scholars. When this was pointed out to Beck, he issued a “clarification” on 12 March. He began by conflating social justice with big government and then launched an attack on his critics “They always change and confuse the language. Political correctness comes from the progressive movement,” he said. “There's a lot of people who say ‘social justice’ and some people don't mean Marxism. But others do, and you need to know, which is it?” But it was obvious the criticism hurt. As Amy Sullivan said Glenn Beck has certainly discovered the dangers of publicly practicing theology without a licence.

Tentative truce: Obama agrees to appear on Fox News

Rupert Murdoch has brokered a backroom deal that will see Barack Obama appear tomorrow on the Fox News show The O’Reilly Factor with its abrasive right-wing host Bill O’Reilly. The interview will end a long boycott of Obama appearances on the Murdoch-owned network. While many will question the wisdom of his appearance on a station that often appears to be a paid-advertorial for the Republican Party, the timing is crucial as it is designed to deflect attention from John McCain’s acceptance speech at the GOP Convention in St Paul. Fox news chief Roger Ailes confirmed the interview after a face-to-face meeting with Obama where he quoted the senator as saying "I just want to know if I'm going to get a fair shake from Fox News channel.”

Obama’s request for a "fair shake" was eminently reasonable as the station has been consistently hostile against the Democratic Presidential candidate. Fox has long been accused of conducting a campaign against him with frequent references to his middle name Hussein and their oft-repeated but incorrect allegation he was educated in an Indonesian madrassa. But with Obama still favourite to take the presidency, Murdoch was keen to broker a “tentative truce” between Obama and Ailes.

The three men met a couple of months ago at the New York Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. According to Vanity Fair’s media commentator Michael Wolff, who subsequently interviewed Murdoch, Obama was deferential to Murdoch but was highly critical of Ailes. "He said that he didn't want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife,” said Wolff. “Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome - just short of a terrorist.”

The question is now whether the interview means Murdoch is preparing to switch sides and support an Obama presidency. Such a move would not sit well with Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly or the many others that have given Fox such a Republican ideological slant over the last ten years. Fox News has been closely allied with the Bush Presidency and played a crucial role in his both his presidential victories in 2000 and 2004.

Such influence did not seem likely when Murdoch launched Fox on 7 October, 1996. At the time CNN was king of the news networks. Ted Turner set the template for 24 hours news coverage and CNN came into its own with viewers glued to its Baghdad-based reporters when the US bombed Iraq in 1991. But by 1996 Turner had sold out to Time Warner and the Republicans were complaining CNN stood for “Clinton News Network”. Even non-conservative viewers were finding its format predictable and no longer innovative. Fox News’s bright and sassy programming, modelled on the entertainment values of the Fox Network, began to slowly attract attention.

By 2000, it was regularly beating CNN in the ratings and Bill O’Reilly had overtaken CNN’s Larry King as the most popular presenter. Fox had charged ahead by changing the rules of news journalism. They were openly partisan, arrogant and pompous, sensationalistic, relied on style over substance, and openly supported the reigning government of the day and its wars. The station appealed to what the 2004 documentary Outfoxed called “the disgruntled, disillusioned and neutered male” by blaming everyone for his faults and failures except himself.

Fox also increased their popularity by vigorously attacking its critics. Bill O’Reilly became notorious for his on-air tactics. He yelled at guests whom he didn’t agree with, hectored and abused them, called them “idiots” and “boobs” and often cut off their mikes if they were becoming too “uppity”. But management never chastised O’Reilly for his heavy-handed tactics. On the contrary, Roger Ailes and his management team encouraged it. Ailes has deep roots in Republican politics (he was media advisor to three Republican presidents, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41) and Murdoch drafted him in to run Fox News after he was sacked by rival station CNBC (now merged with MSNBC).

It was Ailes who recruited Bill O’Reilly to anchor Fox’s flagship show when the station started up. It didn’t take long for him to become the network’s biggest star. O’Reilly had been round the news traps, and was a multi-Emmy winning nomadic TV reporter and anchor of the syndicated show Inside Edition. When Inside Edition sacked him in 1995 he went back to university and got his second masters degree (to go with his earlier one in broadcast journalism) in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Ailes gave O’Reilly free rein to do what he liked on his show The O’Reilly Factor. He was successful by not sounding or acting like a journalist.

O’Reilly courted controversy as a self-styled “culture warrior” and became the cornerstone of the network. He was rewarded by huge ratings, a syndicated radio show and several successful books. He quickly became loathed by the left as he cleverly conflated liberals with rapists, child molesters and murderers. Despite taking the high moral ground, O’Reilly has no manners and regularly operates outside traditional journalistic boundaries of decorum. He regularly rides roughshod over progressive voices while giving conservatives an easy ride. His audiences lapped this up.

Ahead of tomorrow’s interview with Obama, O’Reilly is conciliatory but continues to show a distinct preference for McCain. On Tuesday he called Obama “a charismatic man, he'll win among minority voters, and his entitlement message is powerful.” But, said O’Reilly, the US media are overselling him, and the voters “want their family safe and someone who will get control of the economy.” O’Reilly left his viewers in little doubt which candidate he believed would be better on those two issues.

But McCain does not fit the Bush ideological template that Fox has so assiduously nurtured over the last eight years. He is a renegade Republican. More importantly, he may not win and Murdoch does not like backing losers. According to Wolff, when Murdoch met Obama he had just one simple message to share with him. He had met every American president from Harry Truman on and believed none of them got much time to make an impression. Leadership, according to Murdoch, was about what you did in the first six months. The truce the two men subsequently declared, said Wolff, could be of “vast historical significance”. But even if this is true, can Murdoch drag his ideologically-heavy network with him towards the middle? The O’Reilly Factor will be the first test. As the Scotsman says, it could be a short truce.