Living room ambassadors

"Fox News is the best," says Camillo Borruso, a retired businessman who lives in West Islip, N.Y., and often makes sure the channel is on at the YMCA where he works out.

A self-described conservative, he watches the network for its similar perspective, though he disagrees with the approach it took with regard to one correspondent: "Geraldo, for what he did, he should be fired," he argues. Last week, Mr. Rivera drew a map in the sand describing where he was with US troops during a broadcast. Military brass quickly invited him to leave Iraq. (Monitor freelancer Philip Smucker similarly offended the military during a CNN interview.)

Some who track the network suggest that Fox News has had to jockey less with its on-air personalities because its identity is more clearly defined - people know what to expect when they tune in. The network also utilizes the medium to its advantage, says Coffee, noting its nightclub-like music and fast pace. He says when he asks students to watch Fox they often call it "cool" and say it speaks to them.

Whether a media outlet will attain lasting prominence, as CNN did after the first Gulf War, is not yet clear. Some media watchers say the ultimate winner may be the Internet, which many Americans turn to at work for information and are using to find non-US perspectives, including those from international sites like Al Jazeera.

The infusion of patriotism on all three cable networks - perhaps influenced by Fox and the country's mood - has driven some Americans to bypass the domestic channels completely, opting instead for Britain's BBC and Canada's CBC.

The nightly news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC have not seen the kind of ratings spike experienced by the cable channels, even though they often offer more context to daily events than the cable networks.

"NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw" and ABC's "World News Tonight" have seen slightly more viewers during the war, but those numbers are slipping. Last week, NBC's news program attracted 10.8 million viewers on average (vs. 11.2 the previous week) compared to ABC's 9.9 (10.2 the week before). CBS "Evening News" has been losing viewers in recent weeks and last week drew 7.3 million people (vs. 7.9 the week before).

Tira Grey, a 20-something producer for a nonprofit television company, makes a point of watching the evening news on the traditional networks, partly because she got her start at CBS. She says her choices are definitely personality driven, with her first stop usually being Peter Jennings on ABC. "I find that his off-the-cuff remarks and narratives are the most intelligent of the three," she says.

Among the 1,044 people surveyed for TV Guide, NBC's Brokaw was the news anchor they trusted the most (22 percent). There was roughly a three-way tie for second place among ABC's Mr. Jennings (17 percent), CBS's Dan Rather (16 percent), and Fox's Mr. Smith (16 percent).

Professor Hanley sees Smith as the news anchor of the future, someone who appeals to a different generation not through authority so much as polish and confidence. "If you think of Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather as kind of like the nice father, he's the slick uncle. He's very good."

Meanwhile, as events from Baghdad continue to unfold, it's up to the current anchors and correspondents to keep people from straying. At least one observer suggests that the reason Americans are so focused on the personalities on screen is that it keeps them from having to make serious decisions about the coverage they are seeing.

"You end up sparing yourself having to deal with the political meaning behind the selection of the images, the frequency of the images," says Stanley Baran, chair of the communication department at Bryant College. "It becomes a TV show."

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