Former Fox News journalist David Schuster talks about his days at Fox, now that he has just moved to MSNBC:
When asked whether he would have had that opportunity while working at Fox, Shuster laughed, remained silent for a pregnant pause and said, "No. The answer is no."
He went on to recount his six-year tenure at Fox. "At the time I started at Fox, I thought, this is a great news organization to let me be very aggressive with a sitting president of the United States (Bill Clinton)," Shuster said. "I started having issues when others in the organization would take my carefully scripted and nuanced reporting and pull out bits and pieces to support their agenda on their shows.
"With the change of administration in Washington, I wanted to do the same kind of reporting, holding the (Bush) administration accountable, and that was not something that Fox was interested in doing," he said.
"Editorially, I had issues with story selection," Shuster went on. "But the bigger issue was that there wasn’t a tradition or track record of honoring journalistic integrity. I found some reporters at Fox would cut corners or steal information from other sources or in some cases, just make things up. Management would either look the other way or just wouldn’t care to take a closer look. I had serious issues with that."
The Bloomington native encountered a markedly different culture when he jumped to NBC/MSNBC in June 2002. "One of the first things that happens is you’re given a 50-page manual of standards and practices … and you immediately sense this is an organization that cares very deeply about journalistic integrity."
But we knew this already…
RELATED: Bill O’Reilly (Fox) is going to whine about blogs in his show tonight. I wonder why.