Former FOX reporter David Shuster sat down with his local hometown newspaper,
The Herald Times, and gave a very critical review of his former employer. Shuster, who is now with MSNBC, put it very bluntly that FOX News had some integrity issues.
"Editorially, I had issues with story selection," Shuster went on. "But the bigger issue was that there wasn't a tradition or track record of honoring journalistic integrity. I found some reporters at Fox would cut corners or steal information from other sources or in some cases, just make things up. Management would either look the other way or just wouldn't care to take a closer look. I had serious issues with that."
Now I know many of you are shocked by this, but there is more on the flip.
The Bloomington native encountered a markedly different culture when he jumped to NBC/MSNBC in June 2002. "One of the first things that happens is you're given a 50-page manual of standards and practices ... and you immediately sense this is an organization that cares very deeply about journalistic integrity."
Does FOX News have a manual of standards and practices? Probably, it was written by Karl Rove, though.
"I don't want to say the media always follow the weather vane of public opinion, but in any administration there is an accumulative effect and the particular circumstances of the past five years have driven the media to examine issues more critically than was the case early on," he said.
When asked whether he would have had that opportunity while working at Fox, Shuster laughed, remained silent for a pregnant pause and said, "No. The answer is no."
He went on to recount his six-year tenure at Fox. "At the time I started at Fox, I thought, this is a great news organization to let me be very aggressive with a sitting president of the United States (Bill Clinton)," Shuster said. "I started having issues when others in the organization would take my carefully scripted and nuanced reporting and pull out bits and pieces to support their agenda on their shows.
"With the change of administration in Washington, I wanted to do the same kind of reporting, holding the (Bush) administration accountable, and that was not something that Fox was interested in doing," he said.
Again, shocking, isn't it.
"My parents always wondered why it took me so long to get out of there," he said. "I wonder, too."
Who says parents don't know what is right for their children? Of course FOX, is writing this off as "
a disgruntled employee". It seems if he was truly disgruntled, he would have talked back in 2002.
I am looking forward to his speech this week at Indiana University - "TV News Rediscovers Its Critical Voice: A Look at the Way That Coverage of the Bush Administration Has Changed Since 9/11." Should be fun.