Fox News clears the airtime for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
With the Democratic presidential candidates making network appearances this week after long shunning it, the hatchet appears to be buried. And, for once, not in each other's back.
NEW YORK -- Just a year ago, Fox News Channel was considered a pariah in many Democratic circles. But it appears that the cable news network is no longer in the doghouse.
Consider this week: On Sunday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) made a long-awaited appearance on "Fox News Sunday," a booking that host Chris Wallace had been seeking for more than two years. (The show airs on both the Fox broadcasting network and its sister cable channel.) On Wednesday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) granted her first interview to Bill O'Reilly, a commentator viewed with antipathy by much of the left, in no small part because of his denunciations of the Clintons in the 1990s. And this Sunday, Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean plans to sit down with Wallace for the first time since November 2006.
Last year at this time, liberal activists pressured Democrats to stay off the news channel, which they termed a "Republican mouthpiece," successfully scuttling plans for two Fox-hosted debates. Obama and Clinton, wary of offending the party's base, largely steered clear of Fox News interviews.
These days, the candidates are not so standoffish.
"Fox has given Hillary Clinton better coverage than all the other cables," Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said during a radio interview last week with Fox News' John Gibson.
In recent months, both Democratic contenders have stepped up their appearances on the channel. In the first four months of 2008, Clinton did 10 interviews on Fox News, compared with just three in 2007. Obama has done eight interviews so far this year after appearing only twice last year.
"Both senators are very smart people," said John Moody, the channel's executive vice president of news editorial. "They're locked in a very tight battle, and they're realizing that coming on Fox News is a way to get themselves exposed to the greatest number of people who watch cable news."
Fox News has not enjoyed the kind of huge audience gains that rivals CNN and MSNBC have this political season. But it remains the top-ranked cable news network, drawing 1.78 million viewers in prime time so far this year, up 11% compared with the same period last year. (CNN has averaged 1.18 million, up 52%, while MSNBC has drawn 734,000, up 47%.)
"I never really took it very personally that they didn't want to come on here before," said Brit Hume, the network's Washington, D.C., managing editor. "It was a political play. There was a stage in the primary season when Obama would have been delighted to say, 'See, I'm defying Fox News.' At this point, not so much."
