A couple of weeks ago I was a guest on Fox News's "Strategy Room," a 90-minute bull session that streams on the Web each morning from 10:30 to noon. I'd never watched the show, but I expected it to be dominated by right-wing attitudes and was wondering how I'd react. Read on to see how I held up my end.
I'm a writer in the field of career information and have recently attracted some media attention because of a book I wrote about recession-proof jobs. I've been on a few news shows and "Talk of the Nation," so it was no surprise that I was invited on this show. I was booked to appear on the same show with a career coach and former HR exec named Kate. The booker did not ask me about my political attitudes beforehand, nor when I showed up at the studio in the News Corp. building in New York.
The host was Heather Nauert. To her left sat Shepard Smith, although he disappeared halfway through the show. To her right, the next guest was Kate, and then a lawyer who used to be a JAG in Iraq and wore a ribbon that he told me meant he had earned a Silver Star. I was next, and to my right was the host of a right-wing radio talk show that's syndicated on a lot of stations. I didn't catch his name, and I've been unable to find a guest list of that day's show (it was January 12). Maybe I'd have heard of him if I listened to right-wing radio. I've never heard him mocked on Stephanie Miller's Right-Wing World, so I don't know who he is.
Every now and then Heather turned the subject of conversation to jobs and asked Kate and me for a reaction, such as what we'd advise job-seekers now. We also reacted to some e-mails on the subject that came in during the show.
But basically what we guests did was to riff on whatever was in the news that morning. As it happened, it was George Bush's last press conference, so they showed us some clips from that (Bush being defensive and petulant) and asked our reactions. The lawyer and the right-wing radio guy reliably defended Bush and commented on what a great job he'd done. I remember at one point the lawyer mentioned that we were greeted as heroes in Iraq--he was there, he saw it. I was thinking, "Maybe for a short while. And even then, we were also seen as an excuse for looting any government property that wasn't nailed down." But I held my peace.
The climate was definitely not fair and balanced. It was a given that the conservative attitude toward any given news event was the correct attitude. For example, Heather mentioned how the actress Anne Hathaway was quoted as saying she was unsure how to protest Rick Warren's invocation at the coming inauguration--should she turn her back or just not attend? Heather presented this in a way that conveyed "Isn't this silly?"
I reached my limit when Heather asked whether Bush had made a mistake by not asking Americans for greater sacrifice after 9/11. (It's amazing that she even entertained the idea.) I jumped right on it and said that the very next day Bush should have announced a dollar-a-gallon gasoline tax to help wean us from Middle Eastern oil, fund research into green energy sources, and keep prices high enough so that developers of green-energy products could count on a market--and that the argument that higher gas prices would kill the economy was disproved by our subsequent experience, when gas prices went up without a tax. Mr. Right-Wing Radio muttered, "I don't agree" sourly, but that was the end of that. This was not Point-Counterpoint, not a show on which people argue.
The show drifted back to its right-wing consensus. When it was over, Heather asked me if I'd like to come back sometime, and I said yes. If I ever do go on again, I think I'll be a little more outspoken.