The Times' Russ Buettner must've hated the assignment he got: to produce one more hit piece on Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and Fox News. Sure, it was fun for Russ to be guaranteed the front page for his story, but along with that visibility came the mission of producing some news--something we didn't know. And yet on that score, Russ failed. The Cable Gamer had to read the piece twice before it really sank in that there was nothing new in the story, "In Fox News, Giuliani Finds a Friendly Stage."
Everyone knows that Ailes and Rudy Giuliani have been friends for 20 years, and that they have worked together--in past campaigns, and also when then-mayor Giuliani worked to get Fox on New York cable, so as to protect the 600 jobs that Fox News was bringing into Manhattan in 1996 (it's a lot more jobs than that now--thanks, Rudy!).
What is new, and kinda cool, is the chart that the Times produced (shown on the left here, although you need a magnifying glass!) depicting the number of occasions in which various presidential hopefuls appeared on TV. The chart does, in fact, show that Giuliani appeared more times on Fox than on any other cable channel--115 times through the first six-and-a-half months of 2007.
So does that make Fox the "Giuliani Channel"? Only if, by the same Times-ian logic, MSNBC is the "Joe Biden/Chris Dodd/Mike Huckabee Channel." Each of those candidates, two Democrats and a Republican, have been on MSNBC more times than Giuliani has been on Fox.
Furthermore, applying the Times' dopey metric to CNN, we could call that channel the "Duncan Hunter/Bill Richardson Channel." Both Hunter and Richardson were on CNN 104 times.
And what of the "John McCain/John Edwards Channel"? That would be NBC, which had McCain on 88 times, and Edwards on 80 times. And of course, a lot more people watch the broadcast networks than the cablers, so by pure eyeballs, NBC has "delivered" a lot more for McCain and Edwards than any of the cable newsers have for their most-booked guests.
But it's a free country, with freedom of speech, freedom of booking guests--and freedom for viewers to watch, or not watch. Each network has made its own choices, depending on its own choices, commitments, and biases.
So while the chart is cool, this is a silly story that the Times has whomped up. But then, of course, "Pinch" Sulzberger is a silly man.
