The Role of Differing Host Styles in Fox News’ Prime Time Coverage of Health Care Reform in August 2009

Abstract

Much research has looked at individual Fox News programs as a means to ascertain how the network operates in a variety of contexts, but nearly no attention has been paid to the role of individual program hosts. The host plays an important role in branding news programs and thus directly affects a network’s self-presentation and credibility. This host-based, meso-level study examines how the three Fox News prime time hosts employed differing approaches toward furthering the network’s themes opposing health care reform in August 2009.

Keywords

broadcast content analysis news and reporting political communication qualitative methodology

This article investigates the influence of hosting on the content of the prime time offerings of Fox News. Operating at the meso-level of analysis, where macro-processes of organization and ideology meet the micro-processes of individuals and content (Smelser, 1997), this analysis fills a gap in the larger Fox News literature by disaggregating host styles and closely examining their role in shaping the network’s prime time programming through a qualitative textual analysis.

Fox News

By 2009, Fox News was an established, important player in the cable news field. Between two million and four million viewers tuned into Fox News during prime time (Boedeker, 2009), and the network played an important role in political discourse, especially for conservatives and Republicans (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008). Fox News draws more viewers than all of its prime time competitors combined (Knox, 2014), employing a lineup of opinion programs hosted by personalities whose profiles have risen along with the growth of the network. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta Van Susteren were the face of the network in prime time, and much of the research looking at Fox News examines what they do on their shows. But in doing so, the focus has been on the network, not the hosts. As Chris Peters (2010) asserts, despite Fox News’ ratings dominance in cable news and the emergence of news opinion shows as the staple of prime time cable news, few peer-reviewed studies have examined these programs.

Fox News Research and the “Hierarchy of Influences”

The vast majority of academic research on Fox News has sought to draw conclusions about Fox News as an entity in contexts such as selective exposure (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009), media bias and voting (DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2007), audience demographics (Morris, 2005), content bias (Groeling, 2008), content selection (Aday, 2010), objectivity (Aday, Livingston, & Hebert, 2005), fairness (Hickey, 1998), and party influence (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008). But in all of these cases, the authors seek to make statements about Fox News as a network, rather than looking closely at the individual programs they are analyzing or whose effects they are measuring. There have been some studies of individual Fox News hosts, like Conway, Grabe, and Grieves’s (2007) examination of Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” segment. The authors found that O’Reilly employed propaganda techniques that were more severe and less nuanced than those used by Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. But even this study looked only at one element of one segment of the host’s program.

These earlier studies have operated on the macro-end of Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese’s (1996) “hierarchy of influences,” a theoretical framework through which one can examine how media messages are shaped, looking at the different actors and factors that can influence the final output. The model looks at media at different levels, from the micro to the macro, considering “individual, routines, organizational, extra-media, and ideological” factors, with “these forces operat[ing] simultaneously at different levels of strength in any shaping of media content” (Reese, 2001, pp. 178-179). The bulk of earlier Fox News research has concentrated on the organizational, extra-media, and ideological aspects of the network—on the macro-end of the hierarchy of influences—even while often operating at the show level. Similarly, much of the social science–based communications research on Fox News has focused on the content, reception, and impact of the network’s programming, rather than the performance of the hosts themselves. An exception is the work of Jeffrey P. Jones, including his book chapter on the messages Fox News sends in its morning program Fox and Friends (Jones, 2013; see also Peters, 2010).

The Importance of Hosts in Television News Programs

The macro-focused studies of Fox News have left a gap in the literature as to how the performance of the network’s on-air personalities play into the larger narratives addressed—essentially, a meso-level analysis toward the micro-end of the continuum in the hierarchy of influences (Smelser, 1997). And given the rising importance of the host in the modern news environment (Vraga et al., 2012), which has been diluted by an explosion of programs and programming outlets, a meso-level analysis of Fox News’ prime time programming adds an important facet to an understanding of the network, in line with Shoemaker and Reese’s model. Cable television hosts have become among the most recognizable and, in some cases, admired broadcast news figures, on par with those at the traditional network news operations (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2010), and yet the literature is largely devoid of studies of the hosts (Peters, 2010).

Networks have increasingly relied on branding programming so it stands out from the field of competitors (Chan-Olmsted & Kim, 2001), and the branding approach often centers on the host or anchor of the program (Kim, Baek, & Martin, 2010), as choosing the host is one of the areas in which news organizations and producers can try and control and shape the audience perception of the show (Newhagen & Nass, 1989). In addition, despite any lapses in traditional journalistic practice by television news anchors, they remain the face of journalism for many audiences (Meltzer, 2010). As a result, the host of a news program can be highly influential in how that show is perceived by the public, including affecting the credibility of the network. As Tayo Oyedeji (2007) found a direct connection between the branding of a network and its credibility, the shows, branded via their hosts, have an important role to play in how credible the public finds the news operation. As such, understanding what the hosts are doing is an essential element of studying a network’s practices and the perception of its programming.

The Fox News Brand

On the one hand, research has demonstrated that Fox News produces conservative-leaning content (see, for example, Chalif, 2011; Conway et al., 2007; Iksander, 2005) for a mostly conservative audience (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008; Morris, 2005; Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2011) occupying an important position in mainstream Republican politics (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008). The network’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, has a track record as a producer of conservative-leaning news, and he hired long-time Republican political operative Roger Ailes to run Fox News upon its launch (Hickey, 1998; Sherman, 2014).

But at the same time, Fox News’ branding is built not around its conservative disposition, but on its professed neutrality, with taglines of “Fair and balanced” and “We report, you decide.” Fox News uses a self-representation of being balanced and credible as a marketing tool to attract viewers who do not trust network television news (Bennett, 2001; Hickey, 1998; Jamieson & Cappella, 2008). As Lance Bennett (2001) explains, the network saw the decreasing trust in television news and the growth of the idea that the network newscasts exhibited a liberal bias as a commercial opportunity. Fox News made the businesses decision to try and serve that audience by presenting itself as a news source that could be trusted, while offering a conservative take on the news to counter the networks and CNN.

If the scholars are correct and Fox News’ actual messages do not match the claims of the network’s self-marketing and branding, what role do the hosts play in this conflict? An earlier study on Fox News’ coverage of the health care debate in August 2009 found variation at the host level (Bard, 2016). The host’s styles were beyond the scope of that paper, but they are the focus of this one.

Research Questions

As such, this study addresses how the Fox News prime time hosts, as the drivers of the network’s brand, produce individual-level variation within the unified messages of the network. Specifically,

RQ1: What specific techniques, formulations, and rhetorical devices does each Fox News prime time host deploy to develop a self-specific brand?

RQ2: Within individual-level variation, how do each of the hosts further Fox News’ seemingly coordinated messages on health care reform?

RQ3: How do individual-level and organizational strategies come together in furthering Fox News’ “fair and balanced” branding?

Method

This study follows on an earlier work analyzing the Fox News prime time programs in August 2009 (Bard, 2016). The earlier research found that during the period of examination, the network employed 12 coordinated themes opposing health care reform that were based on untruthful or distorted premises. The current study replicates the earlier examination, only this time, instead of looking at the substance of the arguments (i.e., the claims), the focus is how the hosts approached the 12 themes identified in the first study. Specifically, in this study transcripts were analyzed with instances of the programs discussing one of the 12 themes noted, and then the approach of the host noted and examined (e.g., Did the host directly further the claim? Did the host further the underlying basis of the claim? Did the host embrace, ignore, and/or reject the theme?).

A qualitative analysis of 3 weeks of Fox News prime time programming is an effective way of examining questions around the network’s hosts’ on-air practices. A qualitative, inductive approach to a textual analysis of the network’s coverage of health care reform, in the tradition of Siegfried Kracauer (1953), allows for a more nuanced, context-based analysis of what the hosts are doing in their programs. The examination worked similarly to the qualitative portion of Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira’s (2008) study identifying frames, as this study was similarly creating categories on a predetermined set of attributes.

Examining how the three hosts cover one issue over 3 weeks is an effective way to analyze their practices. For example, Peters (2010), who also performed a textual analysis, watched 2 weeks of Bill O’Reilly’s program to make an argument about how O’Reilly and other cable news magazines use some of the indicia of news to distract from the fact that they inject more opinion into the programs. In the way that Peters was able to find the common practices relating to fact and opinion on O’Reilly’s show, an analysis of the Fox News hosts’ approaches in making arguments against health care reform over 3 weeks allows for the discovery of the consistent patterns in the hosts’ practices.

The 2009 health care debate provides a unique and rich opportunity to study the differing styles of the Fox News hosts. The current position of Fox News as an ideological opposing force to the power structure of Washington was born in 2009, as the November 2008 election shifted Fox News from a position of supporting the Republican president, George W. Bush (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008), to opposing the policies of the Democrat president, Barack Obama. The network’s handling of the health care debate in 2009 established a template from which the hosts would work in the ensuing years of the Obama administration. It is important to note that the three Fox News hosts covered in this study continue to host daily nighttime programs on the network. As such, looking at the genesis of the current Fox News era is valuable in studying the host practices.

As importantly, the health care reform debate marked a rare moment in which one issue was covered in depth over a prolonged period of time, as each of the three prime time Fox News programs featured the issue in at least one segment (often more) in every one of the programs during the period of study. As such, the health care debate provides a rare opportunity to track how the hosts handled an issue every day, day after day, over the course of weeks. And the pervasiveness of the discussion provides a better opportunity to see how the arguments opposing health care reform came together across the three programs in a seemingly coordinated fashion.

Similarly, the length and intensity of the debate gave the hosts the unique opportunity to, again, over time, embrace, ignore, or reject the forceful, sometimes acrimonious and occasionally distorted, arguments offered opposing health care reform. The clash over health care served as a stand-in for the classic conservative–liberal debate over the role of government (Phillips-Fein, 2009), and the rhetoric in the debate quickly included incendiary charges of socialism and racism (Knowles, Lowery, & Schaumberg, 2010), as well as accusations that those proposing reform had nefarious intent. For example, on the August 17, 2009, episode of “Hannity,” former presidential advisor Dick Morris said that health care reform “is a device to take medical care from the elderly and give it to largely immigrants.” (All references to Fox News programs are from transcripts obtained from Lexis-Nexis.) This constant stream of heightened rhetoric over the 3-week period provides an ideal backdrop against which to examine the styles of the hosts. Trying to put together consistent host practices on other issues would provide too small of a sample and/or stretch that sample over a long period of time, making a comprehensive analysis more difficult.

The study covered 3 weeks of Fox News prime time programming—“The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity,” and “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren.” These were the highest-rated programs on the network, airing in the spotlight of prime time, so they were, presumably, most representative of the way the network wanted to portray itself to the public. “The O’Reilly Factor” drew about 4 million viewers in August 2009, “Hannity” captured 3.3 million viewers, and “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren” pulled in 2.5 million viewers (Boedeker, 2009). Also, by choosing the prime time programs, the study avoided Glenn Beck’s show, which may not have been representative of Fox News’ self-presentation, given the problems Beck had with the network at the time (Stelter, 2009) and after, leading to his exit (Stelter, 2011).

This study covers the same period as the original research, as the present study is specifically examining the host practices relating to the 12 themes found in the original study. As such, the examination began with the programs on Monday August 3, 2009, providing a week of programming before former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made the claim that health care reform legislation contained “death panels” (Palin, 2009), and continued through the two following weeks, concluding on Friday August 21, 2009. The study is centered around Palin’s death panel claim because it was a heavily covered, high-profile moment in the debate. For example, the day after Palin’s claim, the New York Times ran four news and opinion pieces in its print and online editions addressing Palin’s post (Dowd, 2009; Egan, 2009; Lorber, 2009; Seelye, 2009).

A host-by-host analysis allows for a deep and nuanced examination of the rhetorical devices used by the on-air personalities to support the network’s themes opposing health care reform, and as such is an effective way to address the first two research questions. A discussion of the larger issues that bridge the individual programs follows, addressing the third research question.

Bill O’Reilly: Protecting the People From the Powerful

In the August 2009 programs under study, O’Reilly often presented himself as a voice of truth and protector of average citizens from the abuses of those in power. He claimed a lack of affiliation with any party or ideology. His self-presentation often contrasted his role as a speaker of truth (he employs the term “no spin zone” to describe his approach) against the rest of the mainstream media, which he viewed as liberal. He tended to sidestep the most inflammatory conservative charges opposing health care reform. And he often made his claims in definitive and sometimes bombastic and self-aggrandizing assertions, presented in a way that set himself above and beyond anyone who would disagree with him.

Ratings as Validation

O’Reilly used the relative ratings success of his program as validation of his self-professed role as an impartial conveyor of information. For example, on the August 10, 2009 edition of his show, he said,

“The Factor” also gives voice to both sides, something you will never get on MSNBC News. So, fair-minded Americans know our reporting is honest, while much of the other TV news media is simply in the tank for the president. Now you’d think that liberal Americans would flock to hear their side propped up, but that’s clearly not happening. For libs, conservatives and independents alike, there’s really no choice. They have to watch us if they want to know what’s going on. And they are in record numbers. “Talking Points” is not gloating, just reporting. But the massive viewership to Fox News is a watershed moment in media history. There is no question anymore that Fox News is now the most powerful voice in the news media, despite unrelenting attacks from almost all other press organizations.

O’Reilly says viewers “have to watch [him] if they want to know what’s going on,” setting himself up as the go-to source of news. Here, the claims are meant as evidence to back up his claims that he “gives voice to both sides,” unlike other media outlets that are “in the tank for the president.” And while he calls Fox News “the most powerful voice in the news media,” he argues that the network is not just for Republicans, because “libs, conservatives and independents alike” watch his show to get the real news. O’Reilly’s touts his ratings—he says he “is not gloating, just reporting”—to establish his show and his network as the only balanced source of news.

Given the volume of empirical studies finding Fox News to be conservative both in content (Chalif, 2011; Jamieson & Cappella, 2008) and audience (Coe et al., 2008; Jamieson & Cappella, 2008; Morris, 2005; Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2011), it seems quite clear that O’Reilly’s argument is more strategic than sincere, meant to give weight to his critiques (or those of his guests) of proposed health care reform legislation.

Translating Hot-Button Issues

O’Reilly often avoided the most controversial elements of the conservative opposition to health care reform while furthering those arguments in a more indirect, broadly acceptable manner. For example, he refused to defend Palin’s death panel claim. Instead, he found ways to promote the underlying idea of Palin’s claim—that health care reform would lead to the rationing of care—without referencing Palin or death panels. In one instance, on his August 10, 2009, program, just after the death panel claim was asserted, O’Reilly aggressively questioned the legislative policy director for AARP about rationing, making claims of medical shortages and Canadian-style, government-run health care, without mentioning Palin. In not joining in on Palin’s claim, he adhered to his self-presentation as nonpartisan reporter of facts. But at the same time, by raising the possibility of a single-payer system and rationing, he nevertheless furthered the conservative message that health care reform would lead to rationing, just without the partisan “death panel” claim attached to it.

The same pattern emerged in O’Reilly’s handling of a USA Today op-ed piece written by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. While the other two prime time Fox News hosts took part in mischaracterizing what Pelosi and Hoyer wrote, O’Reilly did not. Instead, on August 10, 2009, when the other two prime time hosts promoted the mischaracterization, O’Reilly attacked Pelosi in the context of a discussion about the role of AARP in health care reform, calling her “a pretty extreme politician” who does not represent “American seniors,” without ever referencing the op-ed piece.

O’Reilly took a similar approach to the Fox News mischaracterization of a White House website post looking to correct untruthful claims about health care reform. The page asked for reports of “fishy information,” which the other Fox News prime time hosts reported as a search for fishy people, turning the post into an effort by the administration to identify and possibly punish opponents of health care reform. O’Reilly did not join in this interpretation of the site, saying on August 6, 2009, a day after his colleagues had engaged in the mischaracterization, “[A] post on the White House website is asking for information about ‘fishy’ criticisms as we discussed of President Obama’s health care initiative. Now, that has some people upset. Not me.”

Nevertheless, O’Reilly furthers the network message by supporting the underlying concerns of the Fox News claim, even as he dismisses the claim itself. For example, O’Reilly joins conservative pundit Bernard Goldberg in an attack on the hypocrisy of Democrats related to the website. Later, O’Reilly criticizes the administration, portraying the White House post as something negative and, possibly, even an abuse of power. Before long, O’Reilly is portraying the post as looking to quell criticism rather than to dispense truthful information, which was the heart of the mischaracterization made by the other Fox News prime time hosts, saying he “doesn’t care what the White House says” and that he will “criticize the White House health care plan” no matter what the administration puts on its “dopey website.”

O’Reilly as Protector of the Common Man

Despite O’Reilly’s self-presentation as an honest broker imparting unbiased information to his bipartisan audience, he nevertheless regularly engaged in caustic attacks on those with whom he disagreed. But the method by which he is able to act in such an aggressive manner and still claim to be nonpartisan is to characterize his attacks as not based on ideology or party, but as against those who are extreme and out of the mainstream. In so doing, he portrayed himself as looking out for average Americans who were, he says, being challenged by someone in power not acting in their best interests.

In addition to his attacks on Pelosi (e.g., on Van Susteren’s show on August 10, 2009, he called Pelosi “a right ideologue” and “a far left person” who wants to “impose . . . San Francisco values on the country”), O’Reilly went after Howard Dean on more than one occasion, for example calling him and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman “poster boys” for socialism on August 17, 2009. By painting Pelosi, Dean, and Krugman as outside of the American mainstream, he can cast his aggressive attacks on these liberal figures as protecting his viewers from extremists trying to undermine American values.

Sean Hannity: Unabashed Conservative

Where O’Reilly went to great lengths to present himself as not beholden to any ideology or party, Sean Hannity held no such pretenses, openly referring to himself as a conservative. Hannity regularly engaged in an aggressive defense of conservatives and conservatism, while attacking liberals and liberalism.

Accuracy Is Secondary to Defending the Conservative Position

During the period of study, on several occasions accuracy was a casualty of Hannity’s defense of the conservative position on health care reform. For example, Hannity claimed three times on his August 19, 2009, show that Democratic Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said Social Security could be “insolvent in two years.” But Baucus made no such statement. In fact, it was Republican congressman Spencer Bacchus who weighed in on the solvency of Social Security, and soon after making the statement, he recanted it (“Memo to Hannity,” 2009). Despite the fact that multiple media outlets reported Hannity’s error, he nevertheless repeated the Baucus Social Security claim the next day. Hannity’s continued pursuit of the argument in the face of the facts was consistent with his approach during the period of study. He tended to hold to arguments even after some of his colleagues and guests had moved on.

Leading the Fox News Position

Of the three prime time hosts, Hannity was the most consistent in openly espousing the network’s themes opposing health care reform. For example, Hannity was the only prime time host to defend Palin’s death panel claims. While O’Reilly and Van Susteren spent time discussing the idea of health care rationing, neither asserted that death panels existed. But Hannity supported the claim, taking two separate but complementary approaches: First, he defended Palin’s Facebook post (e.g., “I agree with everything that she wrote,” on August 13, 2009). Second, he claimed to have read the bill and found the death panel provisions on specific pages (e.g., “We spotted it on page 425 to 430,” on August 14, 2009). For Hannity, the fact that the Senate Finance Committee had removed the provision that was being cited for the existence of a death panel was proof positive that the death panel existed, even as the section was deleted to prevent misinterpretations like Hannity’s from occurring (Parsons & Zajac, 2009).

Once the idea of death panels was widely discredited, the other Fox News prime time hosts and guests moved to a strategy of translation, reconceptualizing Palin’s claim into a rationing argument, and leaving behind the fictional death panels. But Hannity’s commitment to the existence of death panels hardly wavered. For example, on August 17, 2009, even as former presidential advisor Dick Morris, a forceful advocate of rationing claims, admitted there were no death panels, Hannity would not budge, claiming, they were on “page 425 of the House bill.”

Hannity was equally openly supportive of other themes employed by the Fox News prime time programs. For example, some Fox News hosts and guests turned a statement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that some protesters were seen “carrying swastikas” at events, for which there is photographic evidence (“Nazi Symbols at Town Halls,” 2009), into a charge that Pelosi said all the protesters were Nazis and/or swastika carriers. In the 13 days between the statement and the end of the period of study, the prime time hosts and their guests leveled that charge 42 times, taking place on 17 different programs and covering 12 of the 13 days. In one two-day period alone, beginning on August 10, 2009, Hannity himself referenced Pelosi calling the protesters Nazis and/or swastika carriers 11 times.

Similarly, Hannity was the first prime time host to mischaracterize Pelosi’s USA Today op-ed piece, leading off his show on August 10, 2009, with the introductory line: “Tonight, Nancy Pelosi calls town hall protesters ‘un-American.’” What Pelosi and Hoyer actually wrote was: “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views—but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades” (Pelosi & Hoyer, 2009). Where O’Reilly had sidestepped the mischaracterization of Pelosi’s words as calling all health care reform protesters un-American, rather than just those “[d]rowning out opposing views,” Hannity openly employed it three separate times over the course of his August 10, 2009, program. And he went on to state as fact some variation of the claim that Pelosi had called all health care protesters un-American on four more shows during the remainder of the period of study.

Whether it was mischaracterizing a White House webpage, turning a claim for information into a request for Americans to turn in their neighbors as health care reform opponents, or whether health care reform legislation would cover abortion and undocumented immigrants, Hannity stated the theme and kept to it, even if the other prime time hosts had abandoned it.

Greta Van Susteren: Reasonable Reporter

Unlike O’Reilly and Hannity, Greta Van Susteren came to Fox from a mainstream news outlet, CNN, where she was a legal analyst and host. As such, Van Susteren often portrayed herself as a reporter, and one who, like O’Reilly, was not beholden to Republicans. But Van Susteren also engaged in partisanship, including frequently hosting partisan figures like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and Rick Santorum, and furthered the Fox News themes opposing health care reform even while sidestepping some of the more controversial claims.

Start With the Facts

In keeping with her self-presentation as a reasonable reporter, Van Susteren often steered clear of embracing widely discredited claims like Palin’s death panel assertion, often using factual information as a jumping off point to create or participate in a Fox News theme. One example was her coverage of efforts to boycott the grocery chain Whole Foods after John Mackey, the company’s chief executive officer, wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal opposing proposed health care reform legislation. Mackey’s article was consistent with the statements on health care reform of many of the Republicans who appeared on Fox News during August 2009. For example, Mackey proposed tort reform as a health care reform solution, a proposal made by conservatives in 10 separate segments across nine prime time programs on Fox News during the period of study.

In covering Mackey’s op-ed piece and the ensuing boycotts, Van Susteren did not falsely identify the contents of the article as Hannity had in other cases. Instead, she framed the debate in a way that furthered the Fox News themes opposing health care reform. Van Susteren portrayed Mackey’s suggestions not as similar to those of other Republican guests during the period of study, but as the unique, practical suggestions of a nonpolitical businessman with a record of charitable works. As such, she says on August 19, 2009,

I do not know this guy, and I don’t know if his ideas are good, but there is something to be admired about someone who sees a problem and says here are eight really good ideas, or he thinks they are really good ideas. He actually posts the good ideas.

Van Susteren’s implication is that Mackey is outside of the partisan debate on the issue, even as his “ideas” closely paralleled the statements of her Republican guests opposing health care reform.

The way Van Susteren handled the Whole Foods issue, especially her portrayal of the boycotters and the chief executive officer, helped further the Fox News prime time themes about health care reform. By painting Mackey as a nonpartisan health care reform advocate and the boycotters as petty ideologues, Van Susteren was able to shift the debate on Mackey’s op-ed piece without associating it with the Republican position. And in so doing, she was able to further the Fox News prime time narrative on health care reform without having to embrace the seamier mischaracterizations and distortions engaged in by other hosts and guests, thus maintaining her self-presentation as a nonpartisan reporter.

But Not Always

At the same time, Van Susteren sometimes—often in her opening show teases—raised a more blatantly nonfactual claim, even as she didn’t explicitly embrace it. For example, when the Fox News prime time hosts and their guests were mischaracterizing Nancy Pelosi’s USA Today op-ed piece, Van Susteren used the theme to tease the content of her program. She began her August 10, 2009, show as follows:

Tonight: “Un-American.” Does that mean you? Now, that phrase has lit the country on fire and it’s splashed across headlines from coast to coast. Are these people on your screen un-American for protesting the health care plan? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and majority leader Steny Hoyer say yes.

Van Susteren endorses the Fox News prime time misstatement of the USA Today op-ed article in a way that O’Reilly did not (but Hannity did).

The same scenario played out on the Fox News theme distorting a White House webpage looking for “fishy” information. She opened her August 5, 2009, program with the following tease: “Tonight: ‘Fishy’? Is there something ‘fishy’ about you? If so, the White House says we should report you to them immediately.” Here, she is furthering the theme, turning a post looking for false information about health care reform into a search for people opposing reform.

Let Others Make the Attacks

One of the ways Van Susteren was able to embrace the Fox News prime time themes without taking Hannity’s direct approach to distorting a story was by allowing her guests to do the work in this regard. In these cases, she would either remain silent or raise the issue, while her guest, who in these cases adopted a Hannity-like direct approach to furthering a theme, made the more aggressive charges.

For example, former presidential advisor Dick Morris, like Hannity, openly embraced some of the Fox News themes based on mischaracterizations and engaged in incendiary rhetoric (e.g., saying his 99-year-old father would “be dead today if Obama’s plan passed,” “Hannity,” August 3, 2009). And while he may have moderated his language somewhat when appearing with Van Susteren, he nevertheless said on her August 6, 2009, program, “And then on top of that, they’re expanding coverage by fifty million people with no extra doctors. That means rationing, and that obviously means the elderly are not going to get the medical care they need.” In this way, Van Susteren is able to participate in the Fox News prime time theme of rationing resulting from health care reform, but she does not have to step out of her self-presented role of honest reporter to do so.

Similarly, in subsequent programs, Van Susteren allowed conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh (August 10, 2009, via video clip), Republican former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum (August 10, 2009), and Republican strategist Karl Rove (August 13, 2009) to make unchallenged statements furthering the mischaracterization of Pelosi’s statements on health care reform. In these cases, Van Susteren never directly joins in on the nonfactual themes. Instead, she lets her guests make the most controversial claims without correction.

Discussion

The analysis of the August 2009 Fox News transcripts provides an individual-based, meso-level examination of how, despite maintaining a unified message, the styles and approaches of the Fox News prime time hosts were not uniform, with each taking a different route toward furthering the network’s arguments. The first research question asked how the specific techniques, formulations, and rhetorical devices of the hosts differed, and the second research question focused on how those practices helped further Fox News’ brand, and the answers to these questions are quite clear from the data. O’Reilly held himself out as a nonpartisan, independent provider of truth, giving both sides a fair airing, with an overriding objective of protecting the people from the abuses of those in power. By stressing the relatively high ratings of Fox News and avoiding especially controversial strategies that had been discredited as untruthful elsewhere, and by couching his attacks on liberals as non-ideological efforts to prevent out-of-the-mainstream power figures from acting against the will of the people, O’Reilly was able to support the Fox News prime time themes opposing health care reform while maintaining a self-presentation of neutrality and accuracy. Van Susteren took a similar tact, but instead of portraying herself as an opponent of those in power, she adopted the posture of a traditional reporter, relying on fact-based distortions and letting her guests make the less palatable charges (while occasionally joining in on allegations O’Reilly avoided) to further the network’s anti-health care reform themes. And Hannity took a more direct approach, aggressively supporting Republicans and conservatives and attacking Democrats and liberals, endorsing the more spurious claims long after they were proven incorrect, and putting advocacy above accurate reporting, to further the network’s themes opposing reform.

The individual analyses of the hosts are an effective way to examine how each of them operated and how they furthered the Fox News themes on health care reform. But answering the third research question—how the differing host styles come together to further the Fox News brand—requires analyzing how the individual host styles interact. A meso-level analysis allows us to examine the actual on-air effect of the host style interactions, regardless of motive, especially in light of the already rich body of macro-level studies of Fox News.

We know from the literature that Fox News brands itself as “fair and balanced” and depends on being able to make the claim that, unlike the network newscasts, it provides factual content representing both sides of issues (Bennett, 2001; Hickey, 1998; Jamieson & Cappella, 2008). In fact, Fox News Chief Executive Officer Roger Ailes has argued that the network “employs twenty-four liberals,” while Hannity is the only conservative at Fox News, with the rest of the hosts being “libertarians or populists or you can’t really tell” (Boehlert, 2012). O’Reilly has made similar claims on the air, including that Fox News is the only network that “gives voice to both sides” (“The O’Reilly Factor,” August 10, 2009) and that he is “not in the business of promoting any political party” (“The O’Reilly Factor,” August 27, 2012).

Given how Fox News holds itself out to the public, it would controvert the network’s branding to choose strident, direct conservatives like Hannity to host all of its prime time programs. Instead, by choosing on-air personalities who boast of their neutrality and/or have a history of working in a more journalistic manner, the network can support its branding claims of fairness. In fact, Ailes had experienced the branding problem of trying to launch an overtly conservative provider of content when, prior to starting Fox News, he joined with Rush Limbaugh to launch such a venture, and it failed to find a sufficient audience (Jones, 2012).

So the fact that each of the prime time hosts would take different routes to get to the common themes advanced by the network makes sense when Fox News’ self-presentation is considered. By having O’Reilly boast of his independence or Van Susteren embrace the reporter’s role, the marketing presentation of the network is protected. In this way, the varied styles of the prime time hosts are essential to the network’s credibility with audiences, as the branding of fairness and balance would be a major influence on credibility (Oyedeji, 2007). In this manner, the network can continue to play its role as an advocate for Reagan conservatism (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008), all the while maintaining its branding as fair and balanced. All cable networks face the pressures of balancing content and branding, and while this study is focused on Fox News, it should be noted that a follow-up examination of MSNBC revealed that the prime time hosts in the same August 2009 period did not exhibit the same level of coordination of themes and approaches as found on Fox News (Bard, 2014).

It is important to note the limitations of these findings. First, the study looks at one specific issue, health care reform, so future research will have to determine if these same host style processes are apparent with regard to other topics, as well, especially those that are less incendiary and prominent in cable news coverage. In addition, the study only examines the prime time lineup at Fox News. Cable news networks are under pressure to draw audiences, as they have to compete in the market for viewers and advertising revenue (Cushion, 2010; Thussu, 2007). A partisan approach, as Bennett pointed out, can act as a way to drive a targeted niche to watch the network’s programming (Bennett, 2001). As such, this study does not answer the question of whether the host processes examined here are endemic to Fox News alone, or whether such processes are present in cable news in general as part of a quest to gain and hold viewership. This question would be another important topic for future research.

Conclusion: Public Trust in News

There is nothing inherently wrong with news offered with a point of view, as some scholars have even argued that objectivity neither fosters the best reporting (Bennett, 2001; Cunningham, 2003; Hallin, 1992) nor helps fuel democratic practice (Nerone, 2013; Zelizer, 2013). But the practices of the Fox News prime time hosts—as well as the network, itself—may be problematic when viewed through a lens of journalistic ethics. If Fox News presents itself as an objective journalistic operation, in part by offering hosts with different styles, but, in practice, it does not follow the norms of objective journalism, then the network is just using the indicia of a news network as a façade to mask its efforts to present a unified message on the issues. At a time when public trust in news is low (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2012), given the importance of journalism in providing the necessary information for a democracy to function (Starr, 2009), this kind of deception can be problematic in further degrading citizens’ trust in news.

Walter Lippmann (2011; original work published in 1927), writing close to a century ago during another time of low trust in journalism, argued that one of the roles journalism could still play in society, even if newspapers were not sufficient to create an informed public capable of sustaining a democracy, was to expose partisans in a debate. The differing self-presentations of the Fox News prime time hosts make that task more difficult. When O’Reilly portrays himself as nonpartisan, or when Hannity sits on a set that looks like those employed at traditional objective news and analysis programs, or when Van Susteren presents herself as a mainstream broadcast journalist, all while strategically advancing seemingly coordinated conservative talking points opposing health care reform, they are hiding their partisanship behind indicia of journalism.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

An earlier version of this article was presented at the AEJMC national conference in Washington, D.C., in August 2013, where it won the Guido Stempel Award as top paper in the Graduate Student Interest Group Research Paper Competition.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Mitchell T. Bard is an assistant professor at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. He earned his MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He also holds a JD from the University of Miami and a BA from Brandeis University. His research interests lie in how the atomization of the 20th century mass media system has affected news in the 21st century, especially on television and the Internet and social media.

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