Special Report with Brit Hume

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Special Report with Brit Hume

Genre	Political news/talk program
Running time	60 minutes
Starring	Brit Hume
Country of origin	United States
Original channel	Fox News Channel
Original run	1998–present
No. of episodes	Unknown

Special Report with Brit Hume is an American television program appearing on Fox News Channel. It is aired live each Monday through Friday at 6:00 p.m. ET The show is replayed at midnight ET and (until Fox & Friends First launched) 6:00 a.m. ET.. The show is hosted by Brit Hume, Washington managing editor for the network. The show reports on the day's events, usually focusing on political stories out of the nation's capital, particularly on the U.S. President, the United States Congress, and the Supreme Court. The show has been a part of the Fox News program lineup since 1998, and is the number one political program in all of cable news.

A typical show begins with news stories featuring various Fox News correspondents, followed by an interview conducted by Hume of political newsmakers or pundits. After the halfway point of the show (and a short break for current headlines, normally provided during the live version of the show by Fox News anchorman Shepard Smith), Hume presents what he humorously refers to as "the most scintillating two minutes in television," (or some variation of the same), the "Political Grapevine" — a collection of short items, sometimes humorous, about minor political happenings. Hume sometimes uses this segment to point out oddities in coverage of a story by competing news media. (In the early days of the Iraq War, this segment was referred to by Hume as the "Wartime Grapevine.")

The best-known part of Special Report is Hume's discussion with "The Fox All-Stars," a panel of three political reporters and columnists. Regular members of this panel include the center-to-right leaning Mort Kondracke, and conservatives such as Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill Kristol. NPR correspondent Mara Liasson, who unlike the other panelists (and as a function of her day job as a journalist), offers conventional wisdom but shies away from offering her own opinions. When Liasson is not there, either her left-leaning NPR colleague Juan Williams or other 'conventional wisdom' offering journalists, such as Nina Easton, Jeff Birnbaum, and Ceci Connelly fill in. The discussion usually revolves around stories presented earlier in the show.

The show ends with a comedic clip, usually taken from the preceding night's shows by David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, or sometimes MADtv (which airs Saturday nights on the Fox network, also owned by News Corporation), or Saturday Night Live. Hume then usually signs off with, "That's all for Special Report until next time, and in the meantime, stay tuned for news — fair, balanced and unafraid."

A substitute host usually appears on the Friday edition of the program. Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle often fills this spot. The substitution gives Hume a chance to appear as a conservative panelist on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.

[edit] Bias

See also: Fox News Channel controversies

A study published by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science at UCLA, comparing political bias from such news outlets as the New York Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News’ Special Report, concluded that Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume had an Americans for Democratic Action rating that was closest to the political center, and that Special Report was the most centrist news program on television. Groseclose used the number of times a host cited a particular think tank on his or her program and compared it with the number of times a member of the U.S. Congress cited a think tank, correlating that with the politician's Americans for Democratic Action rating. [1] Some have disputed this rating based on a methodology that is allegedly questionable, especially regarding the fact that this study claimed that self-declared conservative publications such as the Drudge Report and the Wall Street Journal were actually liberal in their slant as well.

The methods used to calculate this bias, however, have been shown to posses faults as explained by professor of Computer Science and the Director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania Mark Liberman.^[1] ^[2] Mark states that the model chosen leads to "very implausible psychological claims, for which no evidence is presented." and concludes by saying he thinks "that many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M are motivated in part by ideological disagreement -- just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored." ^[1]

By contrast, the documentary Outfoxed pointed out a study by the liberal Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting which found that a full 83% of all guests brought onto Hume's program were conservative or Republican and only 17% were liberal or Democrat. [2]