America’s Media Darling: Osama bin Laden

If I asked you which station devoted more attention to Osama bin Laden’s latest videotape, your answer would most likely be Al Jazeera. Well, I have news for you. It was FOX News.

FOX dedicated one hour and seven minutes to continuous coverage of Bin Laden’s video, only interrupted by commercials. News anchor Shepard Smith read a script of Bin Laden’s speech and then interviewed analysts on air for 30 minutes. This was followed by the business news show Your World with host Neil Cavuto, who discussed the effects of Bin Laden’s speech on the stock market. Cavuto interviewed analysts for another 30 minutes. Talk show host John Gibson extended the coverage of the Bin Laden story for an additional seven minutes before moving onto other news.

Brigitte Gabriel, author of “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America” and one of the guests interviewed by Neil Cavuto, told FOX, “He (Bin Laden) knows that it is going to get great publicity right now in the Arabic world. As I’m speaking to you, Arabic television – Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese – are playing this live.”

As I was listening to her, I glanced at the more than two dozen Arab television sets playing in my office. These included four Lebanese television stations (New TV, LBC, NBN and Future), one Egyptian (Al Masriya), the Syrian Arab Republic Television, as well as other Arab satellite channels from Jordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates. I was only able to find one 10-minute news segment about Bin Laden on Al Jazeera and another one, less than two minutes long, on Sudan Television.

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