Hanging in the balance

NEW YORK —  Like many Democrats these days, Barney Frank is looking skeptically at the Fox News Channel.

“If you’re not a conservative, most of the hosts are antagonistic,” the Massachusetts congressman said Friday. “They interrupt you early on, and it’s almost always adversarial.”

But as Frank makes his media rounds at the Democratic National Convention in Boston this week, guess which network he’s booked on? Fox News.

And Frank, a frequent Fox guest, is not the least bit embarrassed about it.

“This is called democracy,” he said. “You have to persuade people of your viewpoint and, if anything, it’s more important to present your viewpoint in places where it is underrepresented. Why send the police to high-crime areas?”

You might say that Fox itself is venturing into unfriendly territory this week in Boston.

Like other cable news networks, Fox will have hours of time to fill during its extensive coverage of the Democrats’ convention. But unlike other networks, Fox for weeks has been the target of unusually harsh attacks from the liberal side of the political establishment, which has released a barrage of charges that the “Fair and Balanced” channel is a thinly disguised tool of the Republicans.

On the offensive

The attacks -- which peaked in mid-July with the release of the liberal-financed DVD film “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” in which director Robert Greenwald laid out his view of how Fox aggressively promotes a conservative agenda -- will continue this week.

Rep. Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont, last week was seeking signatures for a letter set to go out this week to Fox owner Murdoch, calling on him to “actively intervene to eliminate this unfair and unbalanced coverage” and meet with legislators to discuss their concerns.

As of Sunday, nearly 40 members of Congress, including Frank, had signed the letter, all Democrats except for Sanders.

Despite all that, Fox, the top-rated cable news network, said it will have no trouble booking guests to fill all those hours of DNC coverage, though it wouldn’t disclose Friday who was booked to appear.

A Fox News spokesman noted that even during the thick of recent criticisms of the channel, its chief political reporter, Carl Cameron, nabbed the first cable interview with the Democrats’ vice presidential pick, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Getting guests has never been a problem, the spokesman said in declining to discuss the issue.

Convention and Democratic Party representatives didn’t return calls about how they are handling the Fox requests for guests this week. Their elaborate publicity operation has liaisons who coordinate the guest requests from each network, with Fox rival CNN assigning three liaisons alone to fill all the air time.

Is there an upside?

But for some Democrats, Fox appearances pose a dilemma. At last week’s Capitol Hill screening of “Outfoxed,” Democrats in attendance debated the pros and cons of appearing on the channel, where, they said, they often get a poor reception.

Sanders, who appears in the “Outfoxed” documentary criticizing the network, is a proponent of appearing on the channel.

“Fox has a very large viewing audience, and most certainly not everybody who watches Fox is a right-wing Republican. They watch Fox for a wide variety of reasons; among others, because it is a very entertaining network.” He said he has no problem being on the network because “I am smart enough to figure out a way to get my point of view across. I yell very loud myself, and when people yell at me I can yell back and my feelings don’t get hurt.”

Nevertheless, he said, guests have to weigh whether the opportunity to reach that audience is worth it, and he has recently talked to some who have decided it’s not.

However, Sanders, who has made fighting media consolidation one of his issues, hasn’t been invited to appear on Fox since March, when his staff released a report that was critical of Fox News’ reporting on the Iraq war. When the report, titled “Fact versus Fox-tion” was released, a Fox Capitol Hill producer e-mailed Sanders’ office and implied the congressman wouldn’t be invited back. “I’m not sure I’m welcome anymore,” Sanders said.

Other potential guests are taking another tack. Director Greenwald said some on the left are trying to put together “Fair and Balanced Rules” for Fox guests, which would include “no cutting off the mike, equal time for replying and equal numbers of guests” from each side of the spectrum. Guests would ask Fox to abide by the rules before agreeing to appear on the network.

The website MediaMatters .org, meanwhile, plans to monitor Fox’s DNC coverage this week for fairness and balance.