AND IN OTHER NEWS ...

By Richard Zoglin

Fox News Sunday, the Washington-based interview show that debuted two weeks ago on the fourth network, has proved at least one thing so far: competing with the likes of Meet the Press and This Week with David Brinkley is harder than it looks. On the first show, Republican Congressman John Kasich was so bothered by feedback in his earpiece that he had to keep removing it to answer the questions. A week later, host Tony Snow kept referring to Labor Secretary Robert Reich as "Senator." Snow, a conservative newspaper columnist, is a competent but colorless interviewer, and the show is loaded with superfluous gimmicks (questions from viewers sent over the Internet; clips from old Fox Movietone newsreels). Overall, the program--forced to broadcast from various locations around Washington while a permanent studio is being finished--looks rinky-dink.

Yet the show is a milestone. After years of big talk and false starts, Fox News is at least getting into the TV listings. True, the Sunday program ranks a predictable fourth in the ratings (partly because it's on far fewer stations than its network rivals). And it looks awfully lonely on Fox, considering that the network has no plans to start an evening newscast or any other national news show in the immediate future. But with Fox chief Rupert Murdoch vowing to launch a 24-hour cable news channel in the fall--and with a growing roster of network-level talent signing up to help him, led by former CNBC chief Roger Ailes--the concept of Fox News may no longer be an oxymoron.

The Fox network, which Murdoch founded in 1986, didn't even have a news division until 1992. The first man named to run it was Stephen Chao, who had helped develop Cops and America's Most Wanted; he was fired after three months when he hired a male stripper to help illustrate his talk on censorship at a conference organized by Murdoch. A number of top executives--among them ex-CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter and longtime CBS News executive Joseph Peyronnin--came and went after that, and plans changed just as often. An evening newscast was being considered, then it wasn't. A prime-time magazine show, Front Page, went on the air, then was canceled. A late-night news show was put in the works, then abandoned.

News, which typically appeals to an older audience, never fit in with Fox's efforts to attract a young crowd with shows like The Simpsons and Melrose Place. "When I was there," says David Corvo, yet another ex-CBS executive who spent some time at Fox, "my strong feeling was that virtually nobody in the company except Murdoch was interested in supporting the development of a news division beyond what was needed to service affiliate newscasts."

Servicing those local stations with news footage was a priority starting in the early '90s. "There was a conscious decision made that we would not produce at the network level a national newscast," says Paul Amos, who ran the Fox News Service from 1991 to 1993. "Rupert and [former Fox chairman] Barry Diller felt strongly that the hallmark of Fox News would be locally produced programs with assistance at the national level." Amos' staff did no news gathering but acted essentially as a distribution service, gathering stories from overseas suppliers and from Fox-owned stations in the U.S. and feeding them to affiliates. But even this modest effort was deemed too expensive and was scaled back a couple of years later. Instead, Murdoch shifted his attention (and his pocketbook) to acquiring new stations and buying up the rights to sports programming, like N.F.L. football.

Starting last fall, however, Murdoch's interest in news suddenly revived. In November he announced plans to start a 24-hour news channel; shortly thereafter two network rivals, ABC and NBC, did the same. Fox seemed especially ill equipped to pull off such an ambitious venture, given that unlike its competitors, it has no news infrastructure to build on. Fox also faces daunting problems getting space on the crowded cable dial. (NBC will put its new network, which debuts in July, on a channel it already owns, America's Talking; ABC hopes to package its service, promised for late this year, with its other cable networks, like ESPN.) To try to elbow his way onto cable systems, Murdoch is offering cable operators $10 per subscriber if they'll pick up his channel--a not unprecedented strategy for new cable channels but an extraordinarily high figure. The gambit could boost viewership, but will be expensive for a venture that already will cost $100 million to launch.

Nor does Fox's record in TV news inspire much confidence. Local Fox newscasts often stress tabloid sensationalism, and Fox's best-known contribution to TV journalism is the now canceled magazine show A Current Affair. Fox News Sunday is an attempt to establish some mainstream credibility. Despite its bumpy start, the show has done that, eliciting a few newsmaking quotes in its first weeks from such guests as Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour. Executive producer Marty Ryan, who once ran NBC's Today Show, says the program will move outside the Beltway on occasion, in an effort to broaden its appeal. "What we want to do is bring some new people into the tent on Sunday mornings," he says. Fox has also beefed up its political coverage, hiring Emily Rooney, former executive producer of ABC's World News Tonight, to run a New York-based political unit with 50 staff members. They supplied stations with daily stories during the early primaries, and will cover both political conventions this summer. Local news directors, meanwhile, praise Fox for its work on such stories as the arrest of the Unabomber suspect.

Still, Fox is a long way from filling up a 24-hour news channel. According to Fox executives, the channel will probably depend heavily on material from local affiliates and from overseas services like Reuters and Sky News, co-owned by Murdoch. It may also draw on print reporters from Murdoch newspapers in the U.S. and around the world. "You'll see the same effort to cover most of the stories that all our competitors are covering," says John Moody, Fox editorial vice president and a former New York bureau chief of TIME. "But you'll also see a fast pace, and news with a little bit more awareness that consumers are living a harried life these days and need a lot of information as quickly as they can get it." Although Murdoch has criticized CNN and the other networks for alleged liberal bias (and Ailes is a former Republican political strategist), Fox officials say the network will not have a conservative slant but will provide "balanced" journalism.

Neither Ailes nor Murdoch would comment on plans for the news channel. Yet Fox's slim news operation and Ailes' background as the head of CNBC seem to imply that the channel will be some kind of news-talk hybrid. "Rupert has announced that it would cost him about $80 million to start up the news channel," says former Fox News chief Peyronnin, referring to Murdoch's original estimate. "But that does not get you worldwide news coverage on a 24-hour news service. CNN's budget is $400 million. How can they beat CNN on $80 million? Or is it going to be a lot of talk? Is it going to be CNBC with headlines?"

Or will it be something else yet unforeseen? "The thing about Rupert is, it's very difficult to determine what his ultimate strategy is," says Amos. "The move he's making now may not be anywhere near the end of the line." Fox's all-news channel could ultimately be carried by direct-broadcast satellite, which Murdoch has pioneered in Europe, or used to help consolidate Murdoch's global presence. Or it may simply be a way of gaining the Fox chief the respect that his upstart network, for all its ratings success, has never quite brought.

--Reported by Melissa August/Washington and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by MELISSA AUGUST/WASHINGTON AND WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK