behind the news

“Shut Up, Fox!”

September 1, 2004

Outside the Fox building at 48th Street and 6th Avenue yesterday, hundreds of protesters gathered. Apparently in sync with Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly’s rhetorical tactics, if not his philosophy, they seemed to have a single purpose: the endless chanting of “Shut Up, Fox!”

“If it’s good enough for Bill O’Reilly, it’s good enough for us,” one protester explained to an interviewer, in a remarkably reductionist piece of logic.

With the crowd crammed between police barricades on the sidewalk, as New York’s Finest looked on impassively, it was hard to move along the avenue. And with so many people wielding video cameras — many from independent media organizations sympathetic to the demonstrators, like Air America and the Indy Media Center — the line between protesters and press was particularly fuzzy.

One common complaint about demonstrations by the Left is that too many unrelated issues are invoked, producing no clear, unifying message. But in this case, everyone seemed to agree that they were there for one purpose: To adopt the trademark of Fox’s O’Reilly (“Oh, shut up!”) and to toss it back in Fox’s face. Sometimes they experimented with other chants like the pithy “The More You Watch, the Less You Know,” or the cumbersome “Fox reports, People Die, Half the Story, Half the Lie.” At one point, there was even a taunting, “O-Rye-Leee, O-Rye-Leee.” But “Shut Up, Fox!” was the clear favorite.

(The most visible exception to the unity of the crowd was a group of women — scantily clad, in orange and green, as carrots — who attracted this reporter’s attention. They were accompanied by a figure in a full-size carrot costume, and a well-dressed man who explained that Chris P. Carrot was running for president. “The platform is vegetarianism,” said the man, who turned out to be from PETA. Asked about Carrot’s plans to keep America safe in the war on terror, the man seemed flummoxed, and admitted, “He doesn’t have a position on that.”)

A lone Fox News Channel reporter with a tape recorder had inserted herself into the sea of people. She fired a series of questions at a demonstrator: “How old are you? … How did you get involved? … How many of those bumper stickers did you make? … At what cost? … What do you for a living? … Do you think the problem is the media in general, or just Fox? … What would you like to see Fox do differently?” Asked by the protester for her opinion, the reporter declared, “Most media are biased to the left … We’re a lot more straightforward about our bias than CNN.” A second protester, listening in, couldn’t keep from confronting the reporter. “You can’t go on like this much longer because the word is out,” she told her.

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By this point, the crowd was growing increasingly self-confident, and the police were responding by being particularly picky about where protesters could and could not stand. There was a scuffle, and soon a slight, blonde woman was marched into the back of a police van. She had apparently used a bullhorn after being told not to.

The arrest of their comrade momentarily distracted some protesters from the task of telling Fox to shut up. “Let! Her! Go!” they began to chant. But another protester who appeared to be negotiating with the police got them back on message. “Keep shouting ‘Shut up, Fox!’” she told them. This made an impression. “Let’s get ‘Shut up, Fox!’ going again,” someone else agreed. And they were back at it.

A group of counter-demonstrators from the conservative website FreeRepublic.com materialized. Their message was equally straightforward, equally declarative and equally rote: “Fox is Fair and Balanced!” or “I Support Our President, George W. Bush.” One Free Republican asserted that Code Pink, one of the groups at the protest, was a “Marxist front group” that “works hard to undermine the morale of our troops” and that one of its organizers “supports Fidel Castro.”

Up above us in the windows of the Fox building, workers had begun to gather, surveying the scene below. Meanwhile, a cop was using a video camera to film the protesters. Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice told me the footage would be used by the city’s Technical Assistance Reconnaissance Unit, and he said he believed that the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. would also be offered a look.

Others on the Fox staff had come out to the street to leave for the day, and were briefly massed in the courtyard outside the building, separated by the makeshift barriers from the protesters, who they eyed with bemused, slightly contemptuous looks on their faces. Some protesters returned these looks with raised middle fingers.

Perlstein of the Voice, up against the barrier, was shouting at the Fox employees, “You want to do an interview? What are you afraid of? Will Roger fire you?” a reference to Fox News chief Roger Ailes. “Write me up in the Columbia Journalism Review,” he said to me, grinning. “Gonzo journalism!”

Spurned by the Fox staff, Perlstein gave his card to Sam Seder of Air America’s “Majority Report”, telling him, “I’d love to be on your show some time. I think ‘Majority Report’ is the only one I haven’t been on.”

Meanwhile, a woman in baggy jeans, a baseball hat, and a man’s haircut (short back and sides) was violently haranguing the crowd. “I’m with the Republican National Convention,” she declared. “I bet your mothers are proud of you. … How many of you are registered voters?” The woman was quickly surrounded by angry protesters. Much shouting ensued, with assorted references, in order, to Halliburton, Osama bin Laden, and Eric Rudolph. Even as the besieged Republican took on the appearance of a caged animal, she was clearly relishing the spotlight.

Seder of Air America kept his camera fixed on her. A befuddled protester confusing ideological ally with enemy shouted out to Seder: “Hey, you chickenshit reporter! Why don’t you interview us, not one of your own kind?”

— Zachary Roth

Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.