Last night, shortly before Florida’s panhandle polls closed, Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace were bidding their farewells so Brit Hume could take Fox’s big chair as the results came in.
Conversation turned to Fox’s big cross-promotional plans for “Fox Super Sunday.” You see, corporate shelled out big bucks for their football rights. (And they hope to get it back; thirty-second spots—expected to reach an audience of 90 or 100 million—are going for $2.5 to $3 million each.) Trying to prep a small percentage of those viewers for their Murdoch-sibling cable network’s Super Tuesday coverage is plenty good business sense. (The fledgling Fox Business News will also be in on the action.)
“Hey, I have just one last question for ya, Shep,” said Wallace. “I was very excited about you and me working together on Super Sunday, this extraordinary coverage of politics and sports. Except I’m going to be in a studio in New York, and you’re going to be at the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona.”
“I win! I win! I’ve won Arizona! Mark it down,” gloated Shepard, his hands flailing out the touchdown signal. Too much. He switched to his serious American Anchor voice: “You know the great thing about that night, if there’s one thing that a network can bring it’s that sort of a service to the people. When you know that everyone’s going to be tuned in to the big Fox network that day because of the Super Bowl, and all the sudden we got politics for them, maybe someone will learn something about these candidates that they wouldn’t have otherwise learned. I just think it’s a great move on the part of the company, and I bet our friends at the broadcast networks, are might—the other broadcast networks—are mighty jealous that their companies aren’t giving them two hours on Super Bowl Sunday for politics too, so I feel great about it.”
Now, there’s nothing about this that’s necessarily a bad idea—although the “service” talk certainly rings a little hollow, given the cash at stake.
So what might “the people” learn on Sunday? Well, next up was this Olympic-contender style Giuliani “profile” that Shepard introduced next. Remember, this was a “news” segment, but it fit right into a politics-as-sport world.
“Well, Rudy Giuliani’s ‘Florida first’ campaign strategy is a bit like the man himself-goes against the conventional wisdom, sometimes against a massive obstacle right there in front of him,” Smith started. “It’s characteristic Giuliani, as shown since his days as a boy on the streets of New York. Now, we’ve been profiling all of the candidates at “You Decide ’08” and we decided to wait to show you the life of Giuliani until tonight—because the mayor himself put such a focus on Florida. So now a look back at Rudy Giuliani, in our continuing series ‘Before They Were Candidates.’”
Huh. Now isn’t the night of a candidate’s key race, after most polls have closed, a little late to be running his bio piece for the first time? It is if you think the bio might be relevant for voters trying to make a choice. It’s not if it’s just a nice thing for viewers to watch before the big match.
With a breathy shwoosh, the video stared to roll. Jazzy piano chords struck behind black and white photos as Smith’s narration began. “He was born in Brooklyn, May 28, 1944…” On to high school where politics “first seemed to grab him,” as the piano made way for drums and voice-like synths. Then law school graduation in 1968. “That was also the year he married his second cousin Reginia Perrugi—a union that would be annulled 14 years later.” (One sentence, nice and easy.) And soon, knock-off Enya and September 11. Shepard voiced tragedy: “As those fires burned, we watched Rudy Giuliani walk among the ashes, consoling survivors, giving voice to a pain that he and we had never known.” And then, without a pause, strings welled, and Giuliani was shown being beknighted by Queen Elizabeth. As nice as that was, Smith intoned, no title was “more fitting than one he earned on the streets of his home town, blackened by terror. On 9-11 Rudy became America’s mayor.”
Great. See you Sunday, Shep!
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.