Brit Hume (born June 22, 1943) is the managing editor of the Fox News Channel. He hosts Special Report with Brit Hume and is a panelist on Fox News Sunday. Hume graduated from the University of Virginia, and is married to Kim Schiller Hume, Fox News's Washington bureau chief.
Career
Hume was born in Washington, DC, where he attended St. Albans School. He first worked for United Press International, the Hartford Times and the Baltimore Evening Sun. Later, Hume worked for ABC for 23 years from 1973 to 1996, when he went to work for Fox News Channel. From 1973 to 1976, Hume worked as a consultant for the documentary division. From 1976 to 1988, Hume worked as Capitol Hill correspondent; in 1989, he became White House chief correspondent. In 1991, Hume won an Emmy Award for his Gulf War coverage; in December 1996, he left ABC for Fox News. By the time Hume had left he had worked on many ABC shows, including, World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, Nightline and This Week. Hume has published two books: His 1971 Death and the Mines: Rebellion and Murder in the United Mine Workers and the 1974 Inside Story. Hume has contributed to The Weekly Standard, a conservative weekly newsmagazine.
As a young Washington Post reporter Hume discovered that the 1972 Republican National Convention had been underwritten by AT&T and that an antitrust case had been conveniently dropped by the Nixon White House shortly thereafter. This greatly embarrassed Richard Nixon who then had Hume and his wife and children observed by two CIA agents for several months. The agents nicknamed Hume "eggnog" for his blondish hair and observed his family going about their daily business. This came to light during the Ford administration during congressional hearings. Part of the reason ABC later hired Hume was his self-assured and impressive demeanor during the televised hearings.
On February 22 1998 Brit's 28-year-old son Sandy was found dead in his Arlington apartment.[1] It is reported as a suicide, but the autopsy report has not been released. The secrecy and context have generated much theorising about this death, by both the left and the right.[2][3][4] [5]
Controversy
Hume has long been the subject of controversy, as far back as the 1980s, when he played tennis with George H.W. Bush as an ABC reporter.
War in Iraq
Hume has come under fire more recently for comments made on air. One such comment was on August 26, 2003, regarding the loss of life during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq:
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- "Two hundred seventy-seven U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that statistically speaking U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size. The most recent statistics indicate California has more than 2300 homicides each year, which means about 6.6 murders each day. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have been in Iraq for 160 days, which means they're incurring about 1.7 deaths, including illness and accidents each day." [6]
Opponents attacked the factual accuracy of Hume's statement, pointing out that while someone in California has a 1 in 5.2 million chance of being murdered every day, a soldier in Iraq has a 1 in 113,000 chance of dying every day—46 times as high a risk. [7] Supporters emphasize Hume's pointing out an undue focus on Iraq casualties when California murder victims didn't get the same type of news coverage by the mainstream American media. (Franken Accuses Hume)
Hume has also been criticized for statements made on the March 28, 2004 edition Fox News Sunday. During the show, Chris Wallace and Hume were discussing criticism of a joke made by President George W. Bush. The joke referred to the lack of weapons of mass destruction found after the invasion of Iraq:
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- Chris Wallace: "And one that got a big laugh in the room that day -- and I must say, I still think it's funny -- the day after, some Democrats and the families of some American soldiers in Iraq, some who died in Iraq, said they were offended by this kidding about the missing weapons of mass destruction. Brit?"
- Brit Hume: "Well, we have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.
- "And in America today, if your sensibilities are offended by something that has happened, you get an enormous amount of credibility and are taken very seriously.
- "My own view of this is, the president's there poking fun at himself over what goes down, I think, as one of his failures. And I thought it was a good-natured performance, and it made him look good only in the sense that it showed he could poke fun at himself. But he certainly doesn't disguise the record on weapons of mass destruction.
- And you have to feel like saying to people, "'Just get over it.'"
Critics charge that Hume's statement was offensive to the families of soldiers who died during the Iraq war. Others say the statements were not inappropriate in that they were not meant to be about military families and their reaction whatever it may be, rather it was directed at their self-appointed media advocates.
2004 Presidential Campaign
Hume has been criticized for statements made June 2, 2004, on the Grapevine section of Special Report with Brit Hume:
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"The Washington Post has reported that the Bush re-election campaign is using, quote, 'unprecedented negativity against John Kerry.' The Post says Kerry has so far aired only 13,300 ads in major media markets, while Bush-Cheney has aired more than 49,000. But the Post is only counting ads from the period since March 4, when the Bush-Cheney '04 team began its ad campaign. The Post fails to note that more than 15,300 negative ads that Kerry ran during the primary season, which means that Kerry ran nearly 29,000 negative ads, more than twice as many as the Post noted." [8].
In this statement, Hume criticizes the Washington Post report on negative political ads, saying that the newspaper ignored negative ads run by John Kerry. Hume says that the Post should have gone further back, counting negative political ads made during the primary season. However, even if the Post had done that, it would have showed that Bush had run 71 percent more negative ads than has Kerry in one-third of the time. Opponents charge that this statement by Hume was an attempt to mislead viewers, remarking, "Indeed, if Bush had been running ads at his current pace since Kerry ran his first ad, his current negative ad total would be approximately 147,000 -- 413 percent greater than Kerry's current total" [9]. The Washington Post story in question was also criticized by their own ombudsman for being over the top and overstated after numerous complaints from readers.
2004 Broadcaster of the Year award
Controversy surrounded Hume when he was awarded the National Press Foundation's Broadcaster of the Year award in 2004. The head of the University of Missouri's Washington journalism program, Geneva Overholser, furiously resigned from the Foundation's board due to her belief that Hume's political views are connected to his journalistic work. Past recipients of the award such as National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg have also been criticized for allegedly biased journalism, only bias from the liberal perspective.
Social Security reform
On the February 3 edition of FOX News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Hume claimed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the founder of Social Security, would have endorsed privatization:
- Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove private accounts from his Social Security proposal. But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.
- In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans." [10] [11] [12]
Many groups and commentators, including Media Matters for America, Al Franken, and Keith Olbermann, have remarked that Hume distorted Roosevelt's views. An inspection of the context in which Hume quoted FDR reveals that the former president wanted Social Security as we now know it, supported by tax payers, to supplant the government funding simply given to retirees who had not payed into the system at the time of Social Security's enactment [13].
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann claimed that Hume and FOX News committed "premeditated, historical fraud" in distorting FDR [14]; on Olberman's show, James Roosevelt, Jr., said that Hume's "outrageous distortion" of FDR "calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation" [15]. Al Franken shared such sentiment, calling for Brit Hume's immediate resignation [16].
References
Last updated: 09-03-2005 18:37:12
