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Brit Hume

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Alexander Britton "Brit" Hume, Sr. (born June 22, 1943), is the Washington DC managing editor of the Fox News Channel. He anchors Special Report with Brit Hume and is a panelist on Fox News Sunday.

1 Early life
2 Career
3 Controversy
4 Personal life
5 References

Early life

Hume was born in Washington, DC, where he attended St. Albans School. He is a 1965 graduate of the University of Virginia.

Career

Hume first worked for the Hartford Times, and later for United Press International, and the Baltimore Evening Sun.^[1] He then worked for the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson from 1970-72. Later, Hume worked for ABC for 23 years from 1973 through 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 through 1988, Hume worked as Capitol Hill correspondent; in 1989, he became ABC's chief White House correspondent.^[1] In 1991, Hume won an Emmy Award for his Gulf War coverage. He was also twice named "Best in the Business" as a White House correspondent by the American Journalism Review in a readers' poll. In January, 1997, he left ABC for Fox News.^[1] By the time Hume 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, a memoir of his days working with Jack Anderson. Hume has also contributed to such publications as Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. As a reporter for Anderson's column, Hume uncovered an internal corporate memo indicating that the 1972 Republican National Convention had been underwritten by ITT Corporation and that, in exchange, an antitrust case had been conveniently dropped by the Nixon White House shortly thereafter. Later, Anderson published a series of classified documents indicating the Nixon administration, contrary to its public pronouncements, had tipped in favor of Pakistan during its 1971 war with India. After those revelations, Anderson and his staff, including Hume, his wife and children were placed under surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency.^[2] The agents code-named Hume "eggnog" and observed his family going about their daily business. This came to light during the Ford administration during Congressional hearings, and more recently as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Controversy

War in Iraq

Hume has come under fire more recently from the political left for comments made on air, with the criticism led by media watchdog group Media Matters for America. One such criticism concerned a comment by Hume on August 26, 2003, regarding the loss of life during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq:

"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."^[3]

Critics attacked the factual accuracy of Hume's statement:

"Hume's geographic comparison was meaningless, since the total population of California is far greater than the number of U.S. troops in Iraq--approximately 240 times greater. If Californians were being killed at the same rate that Hume cited for U.S. soldiers, there would be more than 400 murders per day, not six."^[4]

Hume has also been criticized for statements made on the March 28, 2004 broadcast of Fox News Sunday. During the show, Hume and Chris Wallace were discussing criticism of a joke made by President George W. Bush, which referred to the lack of weapons of mass destruction found after the invasion of Iraq:

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?"
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.'"

2004 Presidential Campaign

On the June 2, 2004 broadcast of Special Report with Brit Hume, Hume criticized the Washington Post's allegations of a preponderance of negative campaign ads by the Bush re-election campaign :

"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."^[5]

Media Matters for America responded, saying that 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, and further noting that "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."^[5] 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, resigned from the Foundation's board due to her belief that Hume and Fox practice "ideologically connected journalism",^[6] although the head of the award committee, Ed Fouhy, rejected her arguments.^[6]

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, had proposed something similar to the personal accounts offered by President Bush as part of his Social Security reform plan:

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." ^[7]

Some, including Media Matters and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, have claimed that Hume distorted Roosevelt's views. According to Media Matters, 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 taxpayers, to supplant the government funding simply given to retirees who had not paid into the system at the time of Social Security's enactment. ^[8] ^[9] Olbermann claimed that Hume and FOX News committed "premeditated, historical fraud" in distorting FDR;^[10] on Olbermann's program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, James Roosevelt, Jr. said that Hume's "outrageous distortion" of FDR's statements "calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation".^[11]

Personal life

Hume is married to Kim Schiller Hume, Fox News Vice President and Washington bureau chief. Brit Hume's son, Washington journalist Sandy Hume, was a reporter for The Hill, who broke the story of the aborted 1997 coup against Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In February 1998, Sandy Hume committed suicide by a self inflicted gunshot from a hunting rifle. The National Press Club honors his memory with the annual Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism.