Mark Dawidziak offers a thoughtful piece in The Cleveland Plain-Dealer. He is definitely fair and balanced in his piece, giving plenty of room to Fox's many critics. OK, fine. That's the whole point of Fox, and it should be the same with newspapers: We news consumers are exposed to a variety of points of view, and then we each and all of get to decide what we think.
But Dawidziak got some good rebutting quotes from Bill Shine, the #2 at FNC, who snapped back at the critics, "I've been hearing that for 10 years." Shine continued: "I think it's interesting that people say we have a bias in our news, and yet we allowed President Clinton a pretty good forum to come on and say nasty things about us. But the big picture for me is that we're a 24-hour news channel. We're not a political news channel. When a hurricane hits the Southeast, we end up being the Weather Channel. There's nothing political about a hurricane."
Good point, Bill.
Moving right along, Dawidziak challenged Shine to look ahead, and here's what he reported in this fascinating piece:
"Shine said Fox's major challenges for the next decade will include not just staying ahead of programming trends, but keeping up with rapidly changing technology.
"'The rise of the Internet and broadband are changing the questions of who gets news and how,' Shine said. 'Roger [Ailes] has said it's all about getting ready for the next 10 years. The recent event between President Clinton and Chris Wallace was taped on a Friday and aired in its entirety on a Sunday. In between, clips of it were seen on the Internet more than a million times. How do you respond to that and handle it? That's what the next 10 years will be all about for all of us.'"
As I said, this is an important article--a must read.
