Fox 6 o'clock News--5/2/08

Tagline: "The Most Powerful Name in Local News."
Newscaster: Dari Alexander (black, female)
Weather: white male
Sports: white female

Here is a brief rundown of Fox's presentation of the news on May 2nd.

• The new governor of New York is claiming that the police have improperly investigated him after he admitted early on that he had extramarital affairs. He claims this is his only transgression and that further delving into his past is unfair and unnecessary. He is a black male, and his story lead off the whole news program.


• Police raided 3 different homes in Newark, NJ and recovered half a million dollars worth of drugs. Three of the officers shown were white, one was black.


• A naked man broke into a woman's home in Edison and lay in her bed until she woke up screaming, at which point he ran away. The man is still at large.


• Jackson William Leslie Jordan, a white man accused of stalking actress Uma Thurman, now faces up to a year in jail and says he never intended any harm. "He sees now that his conduct caused her fear," says Jordan's white male lawyer.


• Governor Corzine signed a law making NJ the 3rd state to have a family leave law. This allows people to take 6 weeks paid leave to take care of sick family members or babies, just as long as they pay $33 a year towards a state fund. This story profiled a white family with a black adopted daughter. The family was pleased to get the much-needed time off to care for their new daughter. Here was a bit of interracial interaction.


• Spotlight on the Puerto Rican day parade. Labor leader Dennis Rivera was named Grand Marshal, marking the first time a labor union leader was elected to the position. Fox news said it would actually be showing the parade for its first 2 hours before regulating the broadcast to their sister station. This may be a way to lure Hispanic viewers to the station, as their demographic seems to be one of the most underrepresented on the station. The story on the parade was actually a bit longer than the others around it, again perhaps in order to pay special attention to Hispanic affairs.


• Then there was a very short news brief about an NYPD officer's son who was stabbed to death the previous evening. Little was said about the young black man, excpet that he was an aspiring rapper. All of the pictures shown of the man had him decked out in platinum chains and baseball caps, leaning against SUV's and several other hip-hop stereotypical images. They did not mention any possible motives or suspects in the crime.


• Right after commercial, correspondent Dick Brennan (white male) told a profile story about the death of the "Miracle Marine" Merlin German, a 22 year old black male who was horribly burned over 97% of his body while serving in Iraq. "An American hero who never gave up the fight." He made a webiste for children suffering burn injuries. German died while recieving lip surgery. "He lived and died doing exactly what he wanted." In sharp contrast to the story before it, German's death was treated with care and compassion, and featured brief interviews with some of his closest friends. This however is not really surprising as German was a soldier and not a presupossed "thug".


• They then went into breaking news about a big fire in the Bronx which at that time had no reported injuries, though there were 135 firefighters trying to put out the blaze.


• The broadcast ended with a brief piece on hydrogen cars, and how they are twice as effcient as gasoline. Unfortunately, the price of hydrogen is much higher than gas. Seems no real resolution.

Conclusion: Fox 6 o'clock news featured a nicely balanced team of newscasters, though most if not all of the news correspondents were white males. However, many of them are names that Fox has used for years, people they can market to the news audience as trusted reproters on the scene. The variety of stories gave viewrs a good sense of NY/NJ news for the day, and I feel that it was a viable source of daily information. I did notice that crime stories were not featured nearly as much as political/economic news. As the country is currently experiencing a recession, this is not all too surprising. Also, it was rather obvious that caucasians are the predominantly represented race. Asians and Hispanics were virtually absent from the news stories themselves, as well as from any of the people the reporters spoke to in their presentation of the stories. Although Fox is notoriously thick-headedly conservative and often too one-sided for its own good, the network's presentation of the evening news seemed free of their infamous biases and just showed the stories from an unopinionated standpoint.