Ailes, Gore square off amid laughs
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Fox News chief Roger Ailes on Tuesday defended the top-rated cable news channel from an antiwar heckler while deflecting some good-natured ribbing from former Vice President Al Gore about a perceived rightward tilt at Fox.
Ailes, during a discussion about the media's role in democracy at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, also endorsed the integrity of many bloggers, a sentiment shared by U.S. News and World Report publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, also onstage.
CNN's Jeff Greenfield set the spirited exchange in motion by mentioning a Pew study that found that 52 percent of Fox News viewers are Republican and only 13 percent are Democrats.
"I don't know the relevance of a Pew study," Ailes said. "I do know that 100 percent of the people who work there are liberals."
"What about Herb, the guy in maintenance?" Greenfield joked.
"He's downstairs watching Fox," Ailes shot back.
Gore lamented, in hushed tones followed by thundering oratory, that the political dialogue is not in Congress as it has historically been but instead in "30-second television commercials that are not the Federalist Papers."
Gore's animated demeanor prompted Greenfield to wonder aloud how Gore earned a reputation for being a stiff and dispassionate public speaker.
Quipped Gore, in a news-anchor voice, "Al Gore distinguished himself tonight from the wooden podium behind him."
Gore also questioned the TV news media's role in promoting, or creating, society's "serial obsessions," such as the Michael Jackson trial and the Terri Schiavo feeding-tube controversy.
While viewers might get every aspect of a titillating trial, they apparently weren't told in strong enough terms that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Gore said.
Greenfield, noting that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, asked Ailes, "Were we ill-served by the coverage in the run-up to the war in Iraq?"
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
But as Ailes began saying that Fox News reported not just the Bush administration's claims but also what the United Nations, the Clinton administration and the CIA had been saying, a heckler shouted, "Bulls++t!"
"If you want to come up here, we'll get another chair. If not, you can have another drink," Ailes responded as the crowd of more than 2,000 roared.
"If all the media agrees with the same point of view, that's not good for Americans," Ailes said, noting that but for the efforts of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, no other news outlet would have reported the United Nations' oil-for-food scandal.
Greenfield began the session by asking, hypothetically, how today's mainstream media, faced with the Cuban Missile Crisis of four decades ago, might have contended with an Internet site "that everybody reads" and features a "flashing siren" with splashy headlines.
"The only Web site I know with a siren is the Drudge Report," Gore said. "The Internet doesn't glue eyeballs to the screen the way television does."
Ailes said that though Fox News won't "go to air from anything off a computer," many bloggers are accurate news sources.
"Bloggers are not only checking the accuracy of CBS, they're checking the accuracy of each other," he said. "We know which bloggers -- within a very short period of time -- are generally credible and which ones are not."
Zuckerman agreed, saying: "What you get off the Internet is unbelievably passionate. That's all to the good."
Said Ailes: "Freedom of press didn't invent democracy; democracy allowed freedom of the press to flourish. We need to defend democracy."
Earlier, in a presentation about global warming, Gore got laughs by showing a cartoon from "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening that starred a giant ice cube and a yellow-haired girl who looked a lot like Lisa Simpson.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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