Logofile	IMGFoxNewslogo.svg
Logosize	200px
Logocaption	Fox News Channel logo
Branding	Fox News Channel
Launch	October 7, 1996
Owner	News Corporation
Picture format	480i (SD)720p (HD)
Slogan	"Move Forward""Fair & Balanced""We Report. You Decide.""The Most Powerful Name in News"
Country	United States
Language	English
Broadcast area	United States and Worldwide
Headquarters	New York CityUnited States
Sister names	Fox Business NetworkFox Broadcasting CompanySky NewsSky News AustraliaSKY TG 24
Web	Foxnews.com
Sat serv 1	DirecTV
Sat chan 1	360 (HD/SD)
Sat serv 2	Dish Network
Sat chan 2	205 (SD/HD)9477 (HD)
Sat serv 3	Bell TV
Sat chan 3	507
Sat serv 4	Shaw Direct
Sat chan 4	503 / 154
Sat serv 5	Foxtel
Sat chan 5	604
Sat serv 6	Sky Network Television
Sat chan 6	092
Sat serv 7	Sky Italia
Sat chan 7	514
Sat serv 8	Sky
Sat chan 8	509
Sat serv 9	Digital+
Sat chan 9	77
Cable serv 1	Available on most cable systems
Cable chan 1	Check local listings
Cable serv 2	In-House (Washington)
Cable chan 2	Channel 18
Sat radio serv 1	Sirius
Sat radio chan 1	131
Sat radio serv 2	XM
Sat radio chan 2	121
Adsl serv 1	Sky Angel
Adsl chan 1	318
Iptv serv 1	Bell Fibe TV (Canada)
Iptv chan 1	Channel 507

Fox News Channel (FNC), commonly referred to as Fox News or Fox, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation. As of April 2009, it is available to 102 million households in the United States and further to viewers internationally, broadcasting primarily out of its New York City studios.

The channel was created by Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who hired former NBC executive and Republican political consultant Roger Ailes as the founding CEO. The channel was launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers. The channel grew in the late 1990s. Fox News finished the first quarter of 2009 as the second-most-watched cable network in primetime, behind USA Network.

Some critics have asserted that both Fox News's reporting and its political commentary promote conservative political positions. Fox News Channel says that its political commentary and news reporting operate independently of each other and denies any bias in its news reporting.

History

Early years

In May 1985, Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch announced that he and American industrialist and philanthropist Marvin Davis intend to develop "a network of independent stations as a fourth marketing force" to compete directly with CBS, NBC and ABC through the purchase of six television stations then owned by Metromedia. In July 1985, 20th Century Fox announced that publisher Rupert Murdoch had completed his purchase of 50 percent of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent company of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. A year later, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. earned $5.6 million in its fiscal third period ended May 31, 1986, in contrast to a loss of $55.8 million in the year-earlier period.

Quad with the "Fox-Box", where the network reported live during the 2004 and 2008 New Hampshire Primary.]]Prior to founding FNC, Murdoch had gained significant experience in the 24-hour news business when News Corp.'s BSkyB subsidiary started Europe's first 24-hour news channel, Sky News, in the United Kingdom in 1989. With the success of his fourth network efforts in the United States, experience gained from Sky News, and turnaround of 20th Century Fox, Murdoch announced on January 31, 1996 that News Corp. would be launching a 24-hour news channel to air on both cable and satellite systems as part of a News Corp. "worldwide platform" for Fox programming, reasoning that "The appetite for news — particularly news that explains to people how it affects them — is expanding enormously."

In February 1996, after former US Republican Party political strategist and NBC executive Roger Ailes left America's Talking (now MSNBC), Murdoch called him to start the Fox News Channel. Ailes worked individuals through five months of 14-hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before launch, on October 7, 1996.

At launch, only 10 million households were able to watch FNC, with none in the major media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. According to published reports, many media reviewers had to watch the first day's programming at Fox News studios because it was not readily available. The rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20-minute single topic shows like Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics surrounded by news headlines. Interviews had various facts at the bottom of the screen about the topic or the guest. The flagship newscast at the time was called The Schneider Report, with Mike Schneider giving a fast paced delivery of the news. During the evening, Fox had opinion shows: The O'Reilly Report (now, The O'Reilly Factor), The Crier Report hosted by Catherine Crier, and Hannity & Colmes.

From the beginning, FNC has placed heavy emphasis on visual presentation. Graphics were designed to be colorful and attention grabbing and to allow people to get the main points of what was being said even if they could not hear the host, through the use of on-screen text summarizing the position of the interviewer or speaker and "bullet points" when a host was giving commentary.

Fox News also created the "Fox News Alert," which interrupted regular programming when a breaking news story occurred.

To accelerate its adoption by cable companies, Fox News paid systems up to $11 per subscriber to distribute the channel. This contrasted with the normal practice, in which cable operators paid stations carriage fees for the programming of channels. When Time Warner bought out Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, a federal antitrust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to its own CNN. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news channel, instead of Fox News. Fox News claimed that this violated an agreement to carry Fox News. Citing its agreement to keep its U.S. headquarters and a large studio in New York City, News Corporation pressured Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration to pressure Time Warner, one of the city's two cable providers, to transmit Fox News on a city-owned channel. City officials threatened to take action affecting Time Warner's cable franchises in the city.

A lawsuit was filed by Time Warner against the City of New York claiming undue interference with, and inappropriate use of, the city's educational channels for commercial programming. News Corporation countered with an antitrust lawsuit against Time Warner for unfairly protecting CNN. This led to an acrimonious battle between Murdoch and Turner, with Turner publicly comparing Murdoch to Adolf Hitler while Murdoch's New York Post ran an editorial questioning Turner's sanity. Giuliani's motives were also questioned, as his wife was a producer at Murdoch-owned WNYW-TV. In the end, Time Warner and News Corporation signed a settlement agreement to permit Fox News to be carried on New York City cable system beginning in October 1997, and on all of Time Warner's cable systems by 2001, though Time Warner still does not carry Fox News in all areas.

Recent history

On May 1, 2008, Fox News launched high definition channel simulcasts of its programming in selected regions of the United States. Time Warner Cable is carrying this channel in New York, NY, San Antonio, TX, and Kansas City, MO, while Cablevision is making it available in New York, NY and on Long Island.

On Friday, October 17, 2008 at 6am ET, DirecTV launched the high-definition channel. This launch was the first national launch of the channel in HD. On January 9, 2009, Cox Communications added the HD channel and on February 3, 2009 Dish Network did also.

Fox News switched from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a 16:9 letterbox ratio for its standard definition channel at 6 am ET on September 28, 2009.

Outlets

at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport.]]

FNC maintains an archive of most of its programs. This archive also handles the Fox Movietone newsreels. Licensing of the Fox News archive is handled by ITN Source, the archiving division of ITN.

Television

FNC presents a variety of programming with up to 15 hours of live broadcasting per day, in addition to programming and content for the Fox Broadcasting Company. Most of the programs are broadcast from Fox News headquarters in New York City at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, in their street-side studio on Sixth Avenue in the west extension of Rockefeller Center. Audio simulcasts of the channel are aired on XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio.

In an October 11, 2009 article in the New York Times, Fox articulated that its hard news programming runs from "9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays" and "are objective" but makes no such claims for its other broadcasts, which are primarily of editorial and opinion journalism in nature.

High definition

Fox News Channel HD is 720p high definition simulcast of Fox News Channel that launched on May 1, 2008. Most of the programs available in HD (Fox & Friends, America's Newsroom, Happening Now, The Live Desk, Studio B with Shepard Smith, Your World with Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox Report, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren) are shown in widescreen. Fox News Channel began producing its standard definition programs in letterboxed format on September 28, 2009; therefore high definition and standard definition viewers now both see the same picture and stylized pillarboxes are no longer needed.

Radio

With the growth of FNC, the company introduced a radio division entitled Fox News Radio in 2003. Syndicated throughout the United States, the division provides short newscasts and talk radio programs, featuring personalities from both the television and radio divisions. In addition, the channel has also introduced Fox News Talk in 2006, a satellite radio station which features programs syndicated by and featuring Fox News personalities.

Online

Introduced in December 1995, the Fox News website features the latest coverage, including columns from FNC's assorted television, radio, and online personalities. Video clips are also available on both FOXnews.com and FOXbusiness.com. FOX News does not dominate its biggest rivals CNN and MSNBC online like it does in television, as at the end of August 2010 FOXnews.com was averaging an estimated 24 million unique visitors per month, versus 47 million for MSNBC.com and 48 million for CNN.com.

In September 2008, FNC joined other channels by introducing a live streaming segment to its website called The Strategy Room, designed to appeal to older viewers. It airs weekdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and takes the form of an informal discussion, with running commentary on the news. Regular discussion programs include Business Hour, News With a View and God Talk Hours.

March 2009 saw the launch of The Fox Nation, a website intended to encourage readers to post and comment on the news.

Fox News Mobile is a part of the FNC website that is dedicated to streaming news clips that are formatted for video enabled mobile phones.

Personalities

Producing a variety of different programming, FNC has a number of different program hosts, news anchors, correspondents, and contributors who appear throughout daily programming on the channel. FNC has a number of different signature hosts, including Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Mike Huckabee, Shepard Smith, & Neil Cavuto all of whom host programs which are on the list of the top ten most watched programs on cable news. In January 2009, commentator Glenn Beck was added to Fox's weekday lineup.

Ratings and reception

production area]]

FNC saw a large jump in ratings during the early stages of the Iraq conflict. By some reports, at the height of the conflict Fox News had as much as a 300 percent increase in viewership, averaging 3.3 million viewers daily.

In 2004, FNC's ratings for its broadcast of the Republican National Convention beat those of all three broadcast networks. During President George W. Bush's address, Fox News notched 7.3 million viewers nationally, while NBC, CBS, and ABC scored ratings of 5.9, 5.0, and 5.1, respectively.

In late 2005 and early 2006, FNC saw a brief decline in ratings. One notable decline came in the second quarter of 2006 when Fox News lost viewers for every single prime time program, when compared to the previous quarter. The total audience for Special Report with Brit Hume, for example, dropped 19 percent. However, several weeks later, in the wake of the North Korean Missile Crisis and the 2006 Lebanon War, Fox saw a surge in viewership and remained the #1 rated cable news channel. Fox still held eight of the ten most-watched nightly cable news shows, with The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes] coming in first and second places, respectively.

FNC ranked #8 for all cable channels in 2006 and #6 in 2007. The news channel surged to #1 during the week of Barack Obama's election (November 3–9) in 2008 and reached the top spot again in January 2010 during the week of the special Senate election in Massachusetts. Comparing Fox to its 24-hour news channel competitors, for the month of May 2010 the channel drew an average daily prime time audience of 1.8 million versus 747 000 for MSNBC and 595 000 for CNN.

In September 2009, the Pew Research Center published a report on public views toward various national news organizations. This report indicated that 72% of Republican Fox viewers rated the channel as "favorable", and 43% of Democrat viewers and 55% of all viewers share this opinion. However, Fox had the highest unfavorable rating of all national outlets studied at 25 percent of all viewers. The report goes on to say that "partisan differences in views of Fox News have increased substantially since 2007".

In January 2010, Public Policy Polling reported that Fox News was the most trusted television news channel in the country with 49% of respondents stating they trust Fox News. Fox also scored the lowest level of distrust with only 37%, and was the only channel to score a net positive in that regard, with a +12%. CNN scored second in the poll with 39% of those polled stating that they trusted the news channel, and 41% stating distrust, a -2% net score.

Slogan

"Fair & Balanced" is a trademarked slogan used by the broadcaster. The slogan was originally used in conjunction with the phrase "Real Journalism." Comedian Al Franken used the slogan in the subtitle for his 2003 book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. In the book, he cites examples of what he claims to be Fox News' bias. On August 7, 2003, Fox sued based upon its trademark on the phrase. Fox News dropped the lawsuit three days later after Judge Denny Chin refused their request for an injunction. Chin denied the injunction and said that the case, Fox v. Franken, was "wholly without merit, both factually and legally". He went on to suggest that Fox News' trademark on the phrase "fair and balanced" could be invalid.

In December 2003, FNC found itself on the other end of a legal battle concerning the slogan, when AlterNet filed a cancellation petition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to have FNC's trademark rescinded as . AlterNet included the documentary film Outfoxed as supporting evidence in its case. After losing early motions, AlterNet withdrew its petition and the USPTO dismissed the case.

In 2008, FNC used the "We Report, You Decide" slogan, referring to "You Decide 2008" which was FNC's original slogan for reporting on matters involving the election, and the candidates.

Criticism and controversies

Assertions of conservative bias

Many observers and critics of the channel have asserted that it has a bias favoring the political right and the Republican Party at the expense of neutrality. Fox News has publicly denied such assertions. Murdoch and Ailes have reacted against assertions of bias, with Murdoch saying that Fox has "given room to both sides, whereas only one side had it before." In 2004, director Robert Greenwald produced the documentary film , which argues that Fox News has a conservative bias. The film includes clips from Fox News as well as internal memos from editorial Vice President John Moody directing Fox News staff on how to report certain subjects.

A leaked memo from Fox News vice president Bill Sammon to the News staff during the height of the debate over Health care reform in the United States has been cited as an example of the pro-Republican party bias of Fox News. His memo asked the staff to "use the term ‘government-run health insurance,’ or, when brevity is a concern, ‘government option,’ whenever possible." This memo was sent shortly after Republican pollster Frank Luntz advised Sean Hannity on his Fox show that: "If you call it a public option, the American people are split," he explained. "If you call it the government option, the public is overwhelmingly against it."

A Pew Research poll released on October 29, 2009, found that Fox News is viewed as the most ideological channel in America. 47% of those surveyed said Fox News is "mostly conservative," 14% said "mostly liberal," and 24% said "neither." In comparison, MSNBC had 36% identify it as "mostly liberal," 11% as "mostly conservative," and 27% as "neither." CNN had 37% describe it as "mostly liberal," 11% as "mostly conservative," and 33% as "neither." In 2004, the Pew Research Center survey showed that FNC was cited unprompted by 69% of national journalists to be a conservative news organization. The same survey also showed that 34% of national journalists describe themselves as liberals, compared to 7% that describe themselve as conservative.

A poll by Rasmussen Reports found that 31% of Americans say Fox News has a conservative bias and 15% say it has a liberal bias. The poll also reported that 36% believe Fox News delivers news with neither a conservative or liberal bias, compared to 37% who said NPR delivers news with no conservative or liberal bias and 32% who said the same of CNN. A 2007 study looked at the introduction of Fox News into local US markets between 1996 and 2000, and found that in the 2000 presidential election "Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News." The study's estimates "imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure."

A 2010 study conducted by Professor Sean Aday comparing Fox News Channel's Special Report With Brit Humes and NBC's Nightly News coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2005 found that both underplayed bad news, but concluded that "Fox News was much more sympathetic to the administration than NBC, suggesting that, "if scholars continue to find evidence of a partisan or ideological bias at FNC...they should consider Fox as alternative, rather than mainstream, media." Aday also pointed out, however, that the data used in his study may have come late enough in the war to be consistent with accepted practices.

According to trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, Fox News is "largely circumscribed by conservative firebrands such as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck".

Accusations of misrepresentation of facts

The progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America has cataloged what they claim are the ten most "egregious examples" of "distortion" by both Fox News and its TV personalities. The criticisms include several examples of cropping quotes from President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Vice President Gore so they appear out of context, using image manipulation software to edit the appearance of reporters from The New York Times, and using footage from other events during a report on the November 5 "Tea Party" rally in Washington DC. They claim the intention is to make it appear as if a larger number of protesters attended the event. Media Matters also called attention to the December 4 edition of Fox and Friends and accused the show of misleading their viewers with a "questionable graphic" that showed the results of a Rasmussen Reports climate change poll adding up to 120%.

In November, 2009, Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett told viewers that a Sarah Palin book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan had a massive turnout while showing footage of Palin with a large crowd. Jarrett noted that the former Republican vice-presidential candidate is "continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand-new book", adding that the images being shown were "some of the pictures just coming in to us.... The lines earlier had formed this morning." The video was actually taken from a 2008 McCain/Palin campaign rally. Fox senior vice-president of news Michael Clemente issued an initial statement saying, "This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video."

Obama administration conflict with Fox News

In September 2009, the Obama administration engaged in a verbal conflict with Fox News Channel. On Sept. 20, 2009, President Obama appeared on all the major news programs except Fox News, a snub partially in response to remarks about the President by commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and general coverage by Fox with regard to Obama's Health Care proposal. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace called White House administration officials "crybabies" in response.

In late September 2009, Obama senior advisor David Axelrod and Roger Ailes met in secret to try and smooth out tensions between the two camps without much success. Two weeks later, White House officials referred to FNC as “not a news network", communications director Anita Dunn asserting that “Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” President Obama followed with "If media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that's one thing, and if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another," and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel stated that it was important "to not have the CNN's and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox."

Within days it was reported that Fox had been excluded from an interview with administration official Ken Feinberg, with bureau chiefs from the White House Pool (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) coming to the defense of Fox. One of the major bureau chiefs stated, "If any member had been excluded it would have been the same thing, it has nothing to do with Fox or the White House or the substance of the issues." Shortly after this story broke the White House admitted to a low-level mistake, but that said that Fox had not made a specific request to interview Feinberg. Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett responded by stating that he had not made a specific request, but that he had a "standing request from me as senior White House correspondent on Fox to interview any newsmaker at the Treasury at any given time news is being made."

On November 8, 2009 the Los Angeles Times reported that an unnamed Democratic consultant was warned by the White House not to appear on Fox News again. According to the article, Anita Dunn claimed in an e-mail to have checked with colleagues who "deal with TV issues" and had been told that nobody had been instructed to avoid Fox. Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and former pollster for President Jimmy Carter said he had spoken with other Democratic consultants who had received similar warnings from the White House.

International transmission

The FNC feed is available internationally, while the Fox News Extra segments provide alternate programming.

Fox News Extra

Initially, US advertisements were replaced on FNC with viewer e-mail and profiles of FNC anchors set to music. In 2002 these were replaced with international weather forecasts. In 2006, the weather segments were replaced with 'Fox News Extra' segments, various narrated reports from Fox reports on a variety of topics. These reports are generally on lighter issues not related to current news events, and the segments are repeated. FNC also shows international weather forecasts when the Fox News Extra segments run short.

The Fox News feed in the United Kingdom and Ireland does not feature Fox News Extra, and instead features commercials and break fillers from sister channel Sky News's International Variant. For a short period in 2001, a still of the Fox News logo replaced this other content.

Australia

In Australia, FNC is broadcast on the three major Pay-TV providers, Foxtel, Austar and Optus Television. Foxtel is 25 percent owned by News Corporation. Sky News Australia is Fox's sister channel.

Brazil

Since 2002 FNC has been broadcast to Brazil, but the commercials are replaced with Fox News Extra. It is broadcast by SKY Latin America (satellite operator, a joint-venture between News Corporation and Globosat) and in the digital packages of NET.

Canada

In 2003, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rejected a Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA) application to bring Fox News to Canada because Fox News U.S. and Global Television were planning to create Fox News Canada, a combination of U.S. and Canadian news. However in 2004, after a Fox U.S. executive said there were no plans to create the combined channel, the CRTC approved an application to bring Fox News to Canada.

Fox News Channel is currently offered by Access Communications, Bell TV, Cogeco, Eastlink, Manitoba Telecom Services, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw Cable, Shaw Direct and Telus TV. A notable exception is Vidéotron, Canada's third largest cable company, which has not added Fox News Channel to its lineup.

In response to outrage over panelists on late night comedy program Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld making disparaging remarks about the Canadian military, including "...inappropriate and disrespectful comments on the channel regarding the Canadian Military's efforts in Afghanistan,...''", Canadian cable television provider Shaw Communications gave its customers the option of replacing Fox News Channel with another programming option.

France

Fox News is available on cable with the French Internet provider Free and Orange.

Ireland

FNC is also carried in the Republic of Ireland by the British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) satellite television network (Sky) which is 40% owned by FNC's parent News Corporation. It is run as a sister channel to BSkyB's popular Sky News. FNC is usually broadcast as a VideoGuard encrypted channel but during major news stories it may be simulcast on Sky Active, which is free to air. As of September 2006 the channel has carried UK specific advertising, along with headlines and weather provided by Sky News during its breaks. These run under the brand of Fox News International.

Due to the shared ownership of Fox and Sky, Fox News and Sky News routinely share bureaus and reporters for breaking news stories from around the world.

Israel

In Israel, FNC is broadcasted on Channel 105 of pay-tv cable operator YES digital platform. It is run as a sister channel to BSkyB's popular Sky News, which is broadcast on Channel 103.

Italy

In Italy, FNC was launched on the now defunct Italian digital satellite television platform Stream TV in 2001. Part of its programming was translated in Italian and broadcasted on the defunct Italian news channel Stream News. In 2003 was moved on SKY Italia with U.S. commercials replaced by Fox News Extra segments and now is available on 4,600,000 subscribers and 160,000 hotel rooms in Italy.

SKY TG 24 is one of the sister channels of Fox News.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, FNC is broadcast on Channel 092 of pay satellite operator SKY TV's digital platform. It was formerly broadcast overnight on free-to-air UHF New Zealand TV channel Prime, owned by SKY, but this has now been discontinued. No reason has been given for its abandonment. Fox News parent corporation News Corp has a stake in both SKY and Prime.

Pakistan

In Pakistan it is available on PTCL Smart TV and a number of cable, IPTV operators e.t.c.

Scandinavia

Between 2003 and 2006, in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, FNC was broadcast 16 hours a day on TV8, with Fox News Extra segments replacing U.S. advertising. Fox News was dropped by TV8 and replaced by German news channel Deutsche Welle in September 2006.

Singapore

In Singapore, FNC is broadcasted on Channel 702 of pay-tv cable operator StarHub TV digital platform. It also broadcasts its sister channel, Sky News.

South Africa

In South Africa, FNC is broadcast on Channel 405 of pay satellite operator TopTV's digital platform.

United Kingdom

FNC is also carried in the United Kingdom by the British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) satellite television network (Sky) which is 40% owned by FNC's parent News Corporation. It is run as a sister channel to BSkyB's own Sky News. FNC is usually broadcast as a VideoGuard encrypted channel, but during major news stories it may be simulcast on Sky Active, which is free to air. As of September 2006 the channel has carried UK specific advertising, along with headlines and weather provided by Sky News during its breaks. These run under the brand of Fox News International.

Due to the shared ownership of Fox and Sky, Fox News (and Fox Business) and Sky News routinely share bureaus and reporters for breaking news stories from around the world.

Other countries

Fox News Channel is also carried in more than 40 countries. Although service to Japan stopped in the summer of 2003, it can still be seen on Americable (distributor for American bases), Mediatti (Kadena Air Base), and Pan Global TV Japan.

Programming

* Times not listed are repeats of programs already listed from the same day. Repeats commonly occur after 3 hours.

See also

Fox Business Network

Fox effect

The Fox Nation

Competitors

BBC World News

Al Jazeera English

MVC - MUNDOVISION (English News Channel)

Polsat News

Russia Today

Channel NewsAsia

CCTV-9

Sky News

France 24

Deutsche Welle

EuroNews

Nile TV

ABS-CBN News Channel

Australia Network

References

Further reading

The Fifth Estate: "Sticks and Stones", CBC—Bob McKeown investigates Fox News for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 45 min.

External links

FoxNews.com official site

Fox News Mobile

News Corporation parent company

Category:24-hour television news channels in the United States Category:English-language television stations in the United States Category:Foreign television channels broadcasting in the United Kingdom * Category:News Corporation subsidiaries Category:Sirius Satellite Radio channels Category:Television channels and stations established in 1996 Category:XM Satellite Radio channels

Name	Ron Paul
Image name	Ron Paul, official Congressional photo portrait, 2007.jpg|thumb|Paul's Congressional portrait
Birth date	August 20, 1935
Birth place	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
State	Texas
District	14th
Term start	January 3, 1997
Preceded	Greg Laughlin
State2	Texas
District2	22nd
Term start2	January 3, 1979
Term end2	January 3, 1985
Preceded2	Robert Gammage
Succeeded2	Tom DeLay
Term start3	April 3, 1976
Term end3	January 3, 1977
Preceded3	Robert R. Casey
Succeeded3	Robert Gammage
Party	Republican (1976–1988)Libertarian (1988 Presidential Election)Republican (1988–present)
Spouse	Carolyn "Carol" Paul
Children	Ronald "Ronnie" Paul, Jr.Lori Paul PyeattRandal "Rand" PaulRobert PaulJoy Paul-LeBlanc
Alma mater	Gettysburg College (B.S.)Duke University School of Medicine (M.D.)
Profession	Physician, Politician
Residence	Lake Jackson, Texas
Religion	Baptist
Website	U.S. House of Representatives Office of Ron Paul
Signature	Ron Paul signature.svg
Branch	United States Air ForceUnited States Air National Guard
Serviceyears	1962–19651965–1968

Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American physician and Republican Congressman for the 14th congressional district of Texas. Paul serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Committee on Financial Services, where he has been an outspoken critic of American foreign and monetary policy. He has gained prominence for his libertarian positions on many political issues, often clashing with both Republican and Democratic Party leaders. He is the Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy. Paul has run for President of the United States twice, first in 1988 as the nominee of the Libertarian Party and again in 2008 as a candidate for the Republican nomination.

He is the founder of the advocacy group Campaign for Liberty and his ideas have been expressed in numerous published articles and books, including End The Fed (2009), and (2008). According to a 1998 study published in the American Journal of Political Science, Paul has the most conservative voting record of any member of Congress since 1937. His son Rand Paul was sworn in as a Senator for Kentucky in 2011, an event with made the elder Paul the first Representative in history to serve alongside a son or daughter in the Senate.

Personal life

Paul was born in Pittsburgh to Howard and Margaret (née Dumont) Paul. As a junior at Dormont High School, he was the 220-yard dash state champion. After earning an M.D. degree from the Duke University School of Medicine, he was a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon during the 1960s.

Paul has been married to Carol Wells since 1957. They have five children, who were baptized Episcopalian: Ronald, Lori, Rand, Robert, and Joy. Paul's son Rand is senator-elect of the state of Kentucky. They also have eighteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He has four brothers. Two of them, including David Paul, are ministers. Wayne Paul is a Certified Public Accountant.

Early congressional career

While still a medical resident in the 1960s, Paul was influenced by Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which led him to read many works of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. He came to know economists Hans Sennholz and Murray Rothbard well, and credits to them his interest in the study of economics. He came to believe that what the Austrian school economists wrote was coming true on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon closed the "gold window" by implementing the U.S. dollar's complete departure from the gold standard. and welfare, Paul became a delegate to the Texas Republican convention and a Republican candidate for the United States Congress. In 1974, incumbent Robert R. Casey defeated him in the 22nd district. When President Gerald Ford appointed Casey to head the Federal Maritime Commission, Paul won an April 1976 special election to fill the empty seat. Paul lost some months later in the general election, to Democrat Robert Gammage, by fewer than 300 votes (0.2%), but defeated Gammage in a 1978 rematch, and was reelected in 1980 and 1982.

Paul was the first Republican representative from the area; he also led the Texas Reagan delegation at the national Republican convention. His successful campaign against Gammage surprised local Democrats, who had expected to retain the seat easily in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Gammage underestimated Paul's support among local mothers: "I had real difficulty down in Brazoria County, where he practiced, because he'd delivered half the babies in the county. There were only two obstetricians in the county, and the other one was his partner."

House of Representatives

Paul proposed term-limit legislation multiple times, at first in the 1970s in the House where he also declined to attend junkets or register for a Congressional pension while serving four terms. His chief of staff (1978–1982) was Lew Rockwell. In 1980, when a majority of Republicans favored President Jimmy Carter's proposal to reinstate draft registration, Paul argued that their views were inconsistent, stating they were more interested in registering their children than they were their guns. Also in 1976, the foundation began publication of the first monthly newsletter connected with Paul, Dr. Ron Paul's Freedom Report (or Special Report). It also publishes monographs, books, radio spots, and (since 1997) a new series of the monthly newsletter, Ron Paul's Freedom Report, which promote the principles of limited government.

On the House Banking Committee, Paul blamed the Federal Reserve for inflation, it is now available from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to which Paul is a distinguished counselor.

In 1984, Paul chose to run for the U.S. Senate instead of re-election to the House, but lost the Republican primary to Phil Gramm. He returned to full-time medical practice In his House farewell address, Paul said, "Special interests have replaced the concern that the Founders had for general welfare. Vote trading is seen as good politics. The errand-boy mentality is ordinary, the defender of liberty is seen as bizarre. It's difficult for one who loves true liberty and utterly detests the power of the state to come to Washington for a period of time and not leave a true cynic."

1988 presidential campaign

In the 1988 presidential election, Paul defeated American Indian activist Russell Means to win the Libertarian Party nomination for president. Paul placed third in the popular vote with 432,179 votes (0.5%), Paul was kept off the ballot in Missouri, and received votes there only when written in, due to what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called a "technicality".

As the "Libertarian standard bearer", Paul gained supporters who agreed with his positions on gun rights, fiscal conservatism, homeschooling, and abortion, and won approval from many who thought the federal government was misdirected. This nationwide support base encouraged and donated to his later campaigns.

According to Paul, his presidential run was about more than reaching office; he sought to spread his libertarian ideas, often to school and university groups regardless of vote eligibility. He said, "We're just as interested in the future generation as this election. These kids will vote eventually, and maybe, just maybe, they'll go home and talk to their parents."

After the election, Paul continued his medical practice until he returned to Congress. He also co-owned a coin dealership, Ron Paul Coins, for twelve years with Burt Blumert, who continued to operate it after Paul returned to office. He spoke multiple times at the American Numismatic Association's 1988 convention. In 1985 Ron Paul & Associates began publishing The Ron Paul Investment Letter and The Ron Paul Survival Report; it added the more controversial Ron Paul Political Report in 1987. Many articles lacked a byline, yet often invoked Paul's name or persona.

After his unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988, Paul returned to private medical practice and continued to allow the newsletters to be published bearing his name. For 1992, RP&A; earned $940,000 and employed Paul's family as well as Lew Rockwell (its vice-president and seven other workers. Murray Rothbard and other libertarians believed Rockwell ghostwrote the newsletters for Paul; Rockwell later acknowledged involvement in writing subscription letters, but attributed the newsletters to "seven or eight freelancers".

Paul considered running for President in 1992, but instead chose to support Pat Buchanan that year, and served as an adviser to his Republican presidential campaign against incumbent President George H. W. Bush.

Later congressional career

Campaigns

1996 campaign

In 1996, Paul was re-elected to Congress after the toughest campaign race he had faced since the 1970s. As Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress in the 1994 election, Paul entered the race hopeful that his Constitutionalist policies of tax cuts, closing federal agencies, and curbing the U.N. would have broader support than in the past. The Republican National Committee focused instead on encouraging Democrats to switch parties, as Paul's primary opponent, incumbent Greg Laughlin, had done in 1995. The party threw its full weight behind Laughlin, including support from House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Texas Governor George W. Bush, and the National Rifle Association. Paul responded by running newspaper ads quoting Gingrich's harsh criticisms of Laughlin's Democratic voting record 14 months earlier. While Paul was able to paint Morris as a tool of trial lawyers and big labor, Morris ran numerous ads about Paul's advocacy of federal drug law repeal.

Morris also accused Paul of authoring questionable statements in past newsletters, Paul's congressional campaign countered the statements were taken out of context. and that voters might not understand the "tongue-in-cheek, academic" quotes out of context. Further, the campaign rejected Morris' demand to release all back issues.

Paul went on to win the election in a close margin. It became the third time Paul had been elected to Congress as a non-incumbent. In both campaigns, the national Democratic Party and major unions continued to spend heavily on targeting Paul. On December 11, 2001, he told the independent movement that he was encouraged by the fact that the petition had spread the message of Constitutionalism, but did not expect a White House win at that time. Further prompting in early 2007 led him to enter the 2008 race.

Unlike many political candidates, Paul receives the overwhelming majority of his campaign contributions from individuals (97 percent in the 2006 cycle), and receives much less from political action committees (PAC's) than others, ranging from two percent (2002) to six percent (1998). The group Clean Up Washington, analyzing from 2000 to mid-2006, listed Paul as seventh-lowest in PAC receipts of all House members; one of the lowest in lobbyist receipts; and fourth-highest in small-donor receipts. He had the lowest PAC receipts percentage of all the 2008 Republican presidential candidates.

Paul was re-elected to his tenth term in Congress in November 2006. In the March 4, 2008, Republican primary for his Congressional seat, he defeated Friendswood city councilman Chris Peden, obtaining over 70 percent of the vote. On the 2008 ballot, Paul won his eleventh term in Congress running unopposed. In the 2010 Republican primary for his Congressional seat, Paul defeated three opponents with 80 percent of the vote.

Relationship with district

, which is larger than Massachusetts.]] After 2003 Texas redistricting, Paul's district is larger than Massachusetts, with of Gulf of Mexico coastline between Houston and Rockport, Texas, covering some 22 counties. Even so, Paul opposes programs like federally funded flood insurance (typically supported by coastal and rural representatives) because it requires those outside flood zones to subsidize those within, but prohibits those within from choosing their own insurers. In an overwhelmingly rural region known for ranching and rice farms, Despite his voting against heavily supported legislation like farm bills, Paul's devotion to reducing government resonates with 14th district voters:

Paul adds his own earmarks, such as for Texas shrimp promotion, but he routinely votes against most spending bills returned by committee. Earmarks permit members of Congress, rather than executive branch civil servants, to designate spending priorities for previously authorized funds directed otherwise. In , Paul states his views on earmarks this way: "The real problem, and one that was unfortunately not addressed in the 2007's earmark dispute, is the size of the federal government and the amount of money we are spending in these appropriations bills. Cutting even a million dollars from an appropriations bill that spends hundreds of billions will make no appreciable difference in the size of government, which is doubtless why politicians and the media are so eager to have us waste our time on [earmarks]."

Paul also spends extra time in the district to compensate for "violat[ing] almost every rule of political survival you can think of,"

In March 2001, Paul introduced a bill to repeal the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR) and reinstate the process of formal declaration of war by Congress. Later in 2001, Paul voted to authorize the president, pursuant to WPR, to respond to those responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks. He also introduced Sunlight Rule legislation, which requires lawmakers to take enough time to read bills before voting on them, after the Patriot Act was passed within 24 hours of its introduction. Paul was one of six Republicans to vote against the Iraq War Resolution, and (with Oregon representative Peter DeFazio) sponsored a resolution to repeal the war authorization in February 2003. Paul's speech, 35 "Questions That Won't Be Asked About Iraq", was translated and published in German, French, Russian, Italian, and Swiss periodicals before the Iraq War began. After a 2005 bill was touted as "slashing" government waste, Paul wrote that it decreased spending by a fraction of one percent and that "Congress couldn't slash spending if the members' lives depended on it." He said that in three years he had voted against more than 700 bills intended to expand government.

Paul has introduced several bills to apply tax credits toward education, including credits for parental spending on public, private, or homeschool students (Family Education Freedom Act); for salaries for all K–12 teachers, librarians, counselors, and other school personnel; and for donations to scholarships or to benefit academics (Education Improvement Tax Cut Act). In accord with his political positions, he has also introduced the Sanctity of Life Act, the We the People Act, and the American Freedom Agenda Act.

List of bills sponsored and cosponsored

The following tables link to the Congressional Record hosted by the Library of Congress. All the specifics and actions taken for each individual bill Ron Paul has either sponsored or cosponsored can be reviewed further there. "Original bills" and "Original amendments" indicate instances where Ron Paul had pledged to support the legislation at the time the bill was initially introduced rather than at some other point during the legislative process of the bill. {| class="wikitable sortable" style="margin:1em auto 1em auto; font-size:90%; border:0; text-align:left; line-height:150%;" |+ Rep. Ron Paul – U.S. House of Representatives – [R-TX-14] |- !Years Covered !All bills sponsored !All amendments sponsored !All bills cosponsored !All amendments cosponsored !Original bills cosponsored !Original amendments cosponsored !Bill support withdrawn !Amendment support withdrawn |- |1997-98 |32 |7 |223 |0 |76 |0 |0 |0 |- |1999-00 |51 |8 |316 |0 |119 |0 |0 |0 |- |2001-02 |64 |4 |323 |0 |104 |0 |1 |0 |- |2003-04 |68 |8 |354 |0 |150 |0 |0 |0 |- |2005-06 |71 |8 |393 |0 |141 |0 |0 |0 |- |2007-08 |70 |0 |443 |0 |160 |0 |0 |0 |- |2009-10 |41 |0 |120 |0 |69 |0 |0 |0 |}

Note: The numbers for the current session of Congress may no longer reflect the actual numbers as they are still actively in session.

Affiliations

Paul serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (having been on the Western Hemisphere and the Asia and Pacific subcommittees); the Joint Economic Committee; and the Committee on Financial Services (as Ranking Member of the Domestic and International Monetary Policy, Trade and Technology subcommittee, and Vice-Chair of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee).

Paul was honorary chair of, and is a current member of, the Republican Liberty Caucus, a political action committee which describes its goal as electing "liberty-minded, limited-government individuals". Paul also hosts a luncheon every Thursday as chair of the Liberty Caucus, composed of 20 members of Congress. Washington DC area radio personality Johnny "Cakes" Auville gave Paul the idea for the Liberty Caucus and is a regular contributing member. He remains on good terms with the Libertarian Party and addressed its 2004 convention. He also was endorsed by the Constitution Party's 2004 presidential candidate, Michael Peroutka.

Paul was on a bipartisan coalition of 17 members of Congress that sued President Bill Clinton in 1999 over his conduct of the Kosovo war. They accused Clinton of failing to inform Congress of the action's status within 48 hours as required by the War Powers Resolution, and of failing to obtain Congressional declaration of war. Congress had voted 427–2 against a declaration of war with Yugoslavia, and had voted to deny support for the air campaign in Kosovo. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that since Congress had voted for funding after Clinton had actively engaged troops in the war with Kosovo, legislators had sent a confusing message about whether they approved of the war. Paul said that the judge's decision attempted to circumvent the Constitution and to authorize the president to conduct a war without approval from Congress.

Committee assignments

Rep. Paul serves on the following committee and subcommittees.

Committee on Financial Services

*Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology

*Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade

*Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

Committee on Foreign Affairs

*Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight

*Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere

Joint Economic Committee

2008 presidential campaign

Liberty Forum.]] in Manchester.]]

Republican primary campaign

Paul formally declared his candidacy for the 2008 Republican nomination on March 12, 2007, on C-SPAN. His campaign had intense grassroots support—his supporters were said to "always show up"—and he had dozens of wins in GOP straw polls.

Paul's campaign showed "surprisingly strong" fundraising with several record-breaking events. He had the highest rate of military contribution for 2008, and donations coming from individuals, aided significantly by an online presence and very active campaigning by supporters, who organized moneybomb fundraisers netting millions over several months. Such fundraising earned Paul the status of having raised more than any other Republican candidate in 2007's fourth-quarter. Paul's name was a number-one web search term as ranked by Technorati, beginning around May 2007. He has led other candidates in YouTube subscriptions since May 20, 2007.

Paul was largely ignored by traditional media, including at least one incident where FOX News did not invite him to a GOP debate featuring all other presidential candidates at the time. One exception was Glenn Beck's program on Headline News, where Beck interviewed Paul for the full hour of his show.

Though projections of 2008 Republican delegate counts varied widely, Paul's count was consistently third among the three candidates remaining after Super Tuesday. According to CNN and the New York Times, by Super Tuesday Paul had received five delegates in North Dakota, and was projected to receive two in Iowa, four in Nevada, and five in Alaska based on caucus results, totaling 16 delegates. However, Paul's campaign projected 42 delegates based on the same results, including delegates from Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota.

In the January Louisiana caucus, Paul placed second behind John McCain, but uncommitted delegates outnumbered both candidates' pledged delegates, since a registration deadline had been extended to January 12. Paul said he had the greatest number of pledged Louisiana delegates who had registered by the original January 10 deadline, and formally challenged the deadline extension and the Louisiana GOP's exclusion of voters due to an outdated list; he projected three Louisiana delegates. The Super Tuesday West Virginia caucus was won by Mike Huckabee, whose state campaign coordinators reportedly arranged to give three Huckabee delegates to Paul in exchange for votes from Paul's supporters. Huckabee has not confirmed this delegate pledge.

Paul's preference votes in primaries and caucuses began at 10 percent in Iowa (winning Jefferson County) and eight percent in New Hampshire, where he had the support of state sovereignty champion, State Representative Dan Itse; on Super Tuesday they ranged from 25 percent in Montana and 21 percent in North Dakota caucuses, where he won several counties, to three percent in several state primaries, averaging under 10 percent in primaries overall. After sweeping four states on March 4, McCain was widely projected to have a majority of delegates pledged to vote for him in the September party convention. Paul obliquely acknowledged McCain on March 6: "Though victory in the political sense [is] not available, many victories have been achieved due to hard work and enthusiasm." He continued to contest the remaining primaries, having added, "McCain has the nominal number ... but if you're in a campaign for only gaining power, that is one thing; if you're in a campaign to influence ideas and the future of the country, it's never over." Paul's recent book, , became a New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller immediately upon release. His newest book, End the Fed, has been released.

On June 12, 2008, Paul withdrew his bid for the Republican nomination, citing his resources could be better spent on improving America. Some of the $4 million remaining campaign contributions was invested into the new political action and advocacy group called Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty. Paul told the newsmagazine NOW on PBS the goal of the Campaign for Liberty is to "spread the message of the Constitution and limited government, while at the same time organizing at the grassroots level and teaching pro-liberty activists how to run effective campaigns and win elections at every level of government."

Newsletter controversy

Controversial claims made in Ron Paul's newsletters, written in the first person, included statements such as "Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day." Along with "even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." Another notable statement that garnered controversy was "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be" An issue from 1992 refers to carjacking as the "hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos." In an article title "The Pink House" the newsletter wrote that " "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities."

Shortly afterwards, The New Republic released many previously unpublicized quotations attributed to Paul in James Kirchick's "Angry White Man" article. Kirchick accused Paul of having made racist, sexist, and derogatory comments geared towards African Americans, women, and the LGBT community. Kircheck also accused Paul of possessing "an obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry." CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer that the writing "Didn't sound like the Ron Paul I've come to know." Later, Nelson Linder, president of the Austin chapter of the NAACP, also defended Paul.

Reason republished Paul's 1996 defense of the newsletters, and later reported evidence from "a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists" that Lew Rockwell had been the chief ghostwriter.

Paul had given his own account of the newsletters in March 2001, stating the documents were authored by ghostwriters, and that while he did not author the challenged passages, he bore "some moral responsibility" for their publication.

Support for third party candidates

On September 5, 2008, the Constitution Party of Montana removed Chuck Baldwin from their presidential ticket, replacing him with Ron Paul for president and Michael Peroutka for vice president. Paul made an announcement stating that he "was aware that the party planned to do this, and has said that as long as he can remain passive and silent about the development, and as long as he need not sign any declaration of candidacy, that he does not object." stating that that he did not "seek nor consent" to the Montana Constitution Party's nomination. stating that the request was sent to them too late. On September 4, 2008, a list of electors in Louisiana using the label "Louisiana Taxpayers Party" filed papers and paid $500 with the Secretary of State's Office. The congressman had reportedly invited presidential candidates Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney, and Ralph Nader to the press conference, leading some to speculate that they would endorse Paul running for president on the ticket of either the Constitution, Libertarian or other third party.

On September 10, 2008, Paul confirmed his "open endorsement" (CNN) for the four candidates at a press conference in Washington D.C. He also revealed that he had rejected a request for an endorsement of John McCain. He later appeared on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer with Nader where they presented and briefly laid out the four principles that all the independent candidates had agreed on as the most important key issues of the presidential race. On September 22, 2008, in response to a written statement by Bob Barr, Paul abandoned his former neutral stance and announced his support of Chuck Baldwin in the 2008 presidential election.

In the 2008 general election, Paul still received 41,905 votes despite not actively running for the seat. He was listed on the ballot in Montana on the Constitution Party label, and in Louisiana on the "Louisiana Taxpayers Party" ticket, and received write-in votes in California (17,006), Pennsylvania (3,527), New Hampshire (1,092), and other states. (Not all U.S. jurisdictions require the counting or reporting of write-in votes.)

Post presidential campaign activities

On February 26, 2009, Ron Paul was a key speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., speaking for 20 minutes on topics including monetary theory and policy in the United States, in addition to the War in Iraq, and international foreign policy. Paul's Campaign for Liberty sent 140 volunteers to CPAC 2009 to distribute materials, and significantly increased that number the following year.

In the 2009 CPAC Presidential Preference straw poll for the 2012 election, Paul tied 2008 GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin for third place with 13% of the vote, behind fellow former candidate Mitt Romney and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. However, in the 2010 CPAC straw poll, he came out on top, decisively winning with 31%, followed distantly by Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, among others. In the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll, Paul finished second place with 24% of the vote (438 votes), behind only Mitt Romney (with 439 votes). An April 2010 Rasmussen poll found that Ron Paul and President Obama were nearly tied for the 2012 presidential election among likely voters, although later polls showed him trailing significantly. He also trails in polls for the Republican presidential nomination, typically behind Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich.

Speculated 2012 presidential run

There is speculation among pundits and journalists regarding the prospect of Paul running for president again in 2012. When Paul's wife, Carol, was asked if he would run in 2012 her response was "If you would ask him now he would probably say 'no', but he did say...things are happening so quickly and fast in our country, if we're at a crisis period and they need someone...with the knowledge he has...then he would do it."

Jesse Benton, Senior VP of Campaign for Liberty, has said of the prospective run: "If the decision had to be made today, it would be 'no', but he is considering it very strongly and there is a decent likelihood that he will. A lot of it depends on things going on in his personal life and also what's going on in the country."

As part of an effort to encourage Ron Paul to run for president in 2012, a Tea Party moneybomb has been set up with the aim of repeating the 2007 Ron Paul Tea Party moneybomb, which gave Paul's 2008 presidential campaign over $6 million in one day. The goal of The Ron Paul Tea Party is to have 100,000 people donate $100 each on December 16, 2010 to kick off Paul's 2012 presidential run, should he decide to run.

Political positions

Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, June 15, 2007.]]

Paul has been described as conservative, Constitutionalist, and libertarian. reflects both his medical degree and his insistence that he will "never vote for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution." One scoring method published in the American Journal of Political Science found Paul the most conservative of all 3,320 members of Congress from 1937 to 2002. Paul's foreign policy of nonintervention made him the only 2008 Republican presidential candidate to have voted against the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. He advocates withdrawal from the United Nations, and from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for reasons of maintaining strong national sovereignty. He supports free trade, rejecting membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization as "managed trade". He supports tighter border security and opposes welfare for illegal aliens, birthright citizenship and amnesty; he voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006. He voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks, but suggested war alternatives such as authorizing the president to grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal targeting specific terrorists.

Paul adheres deeply to Austrian school economics; he has authored six books on the subject, and displays pictures of Austrian school economists Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises (as well as of Grover Cleveland) he cast two thirds of all the lone negative votes in the House during a 1995–1997 period. and states he has never voted to approve a budget deficit. Paul believes that the country could abolish the individual income tax by scaling back federal spending to its fiscal year 2000 levels; financing government operations would primarily come through the corporate income tax, excise taxes and tariffs. He supports eliminating most federal government agencies, calling them unnecessary bureaucracies. Paul also believes the longterm erosion of the U.S. dollar's purchasing power through inflation is attributable to its lack of any commodity backing. However, Paul does not support a complete return to a gold standard, instead preferring to legitimize gold and silver as legal tender and to remove the sales tax on them. He also advocates gradual elimination of the Federal Reserve System.

Paul supports constitutional rights, such as the right to keep and bear arms, and habeas corpus for political detainees. He opposes the Patriot Act, federal use of torture, presidential autonomy, a national ID card, domestic surveillance, and the draft. Citing the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, Paul advocates states' rights to decide how to regulate social matters not directly found in the Constitution. Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life", "an unshakable foe of abortion", and believes regulation or ban on medical decisions about maternal or fetal health is "best handled at the state level". He says his years as an obstetrician led him to believe life begins at conception; his abortion-related legislation, like the Sanctity of Life Act, is intended to negate Roe v. Wade and to get "the federal government completely out of the business of regulating state matters." Paul also believes that the notion of the separation of church and state is currently misused by the court system: "In case after case, the Supreme Court has used the infamous 'separation of church and state' metaphor to uphold court decisions that allow the federal government to intrude upon and deprive citizens of their religious liberty."

He opposes federal regulation of the death penalty, of education, and of marriage, and supports revising the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy to focus on disruptive sexual behavior (whether heterosexual or homosexual). As a free-market environmentalist, he asserts private property rights in relation to environmental protection and pollution prevention. He also opposes the federal War on Drugs, and thinks the states should decide whether to regulate or deregulate drugs such as medical marijuana. Paul pushes to eliminate federal involvement in and management of health care, which he argues would allow prices to drop due to the fundamental dynamics of a free market. He is an outspoken proponent for increased ballot access for 3rd party candidates and numerous election law reforms which he believes would allow more voter control. Ron Paul has also stated that “The government shouldn't be in the medical business." He is also opposed to government flu inoculation programs.

Paul takes a critical view of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguing that it was unconstitutional and did not improve race relations.

Books authored

Other contributions

References

External links

Ron Paul's Personal Website, books, articles, links to political sites connected with Ron Paul

RonPaul.com speeches, essays, interviews, photos and videos

Ron Paul Library articles and speeches by Ron Paul

Ron Paul Forums

;Congress

U.S. House of Representatives Office of Ron Paul

Congressional campaign website

;Organizations Founded

Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty

Ron Paul's Liberty PAC

Ron Paul's F.R.E.E. Foundation – The Foundation for Rational Economics and Education

;Presidential campaign

NOW on PBS "Ron Paul and Internet Politics". Also, a September 2008 NOW on PBS interview with Ron Paul

PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer — Vote 2008: Ron Paul

Category:1935 births Category:Living people Category:American anti-Iraq War activists Category:American foreign policy writers Category:American libertarians Category:American physicians Category:American political writers Category:American writers of German descent Category:Baptists from the United States Category:Classical liberals Category:Conservatism in the United States Category:Drug policy reform activists Category:Duke University alumni Category:Gettysburg College alumni Category:Internet memes Category:Libertarian Party (United States) presidential nominees Category:Libertarian theorists Category:Members of the United States House of Representatives from Texas Category:Military physicians Category:People from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Category:People from Brazoria County, Texas Category:Physicians from Texas Category:Politicians from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Category:Texas Republicans Category:Texas Libertarians Category:United States Air Force officers Category:United States presidential candidates, 1988 Category:United States presidential candidates, 2008 Category:University of Pittsburgh people

Name	Kurt Vonnegut
Caption	Vonnegut speaking in 2004
Birthname	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Birthdate	November 11, 1922
Birthplace	Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Deathdate	April 11, 2007
Deathplace	New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist, essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1949–2005
Genre	SatireBlack comedyScience fiction
Influences	Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph Heller, William March, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Eugene V. Debs, Powers Hapgood, George Bernard Shaw, James Thurber, James Joyce
Influenced	Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, Paul Auster, Mitch Berman, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Jhonen Vasquez, Louis Sachar, George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, Carlton Mellick III, Kula Shaker, Chris Bachelder, James Rivera, John Irving, Aka Morchiladze
Website	http://vonnegut.com/

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. He wrote such works as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Life

Early years

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith Lieber. Both his father and his grandfather attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated to Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in Chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study Mechanical Engineering.

World War II

Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges' First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks..." Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away. Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."

Vonnegut was repatriated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".

Post-war career

After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era: "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time." Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists and he was not one of them. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus, located within the town of Glenville, just across the Mohawk River from the city of Schenectady. Vonnegut rented an upstairs apartment located along Alplaus Creek across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. The apartment where Vonnegut lived for a brief time still to this day has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories and into the under-part of which he carved his name. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left. On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine and the Modern Library.

Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod, where he managed the first Saab dealership established in the U.S.

Personal life

The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz., about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.

His daughter Edith ("Edie"), an artist, was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. She has had her work published in a book titled Domestic Goddesses and was once married to Geraldo Rivera. His youngest biological daughter, Nanette ("Nanny"), was named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose".

Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer. In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.

Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book Angels Without Wings : A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy.

On November 11, 1999, the asteroid 25399 Vonnegut was named in Vonnegut's honor.

On January 31, 2001, a fire destroyed the top story of his home. Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition for four days. He survived, but his personal archives were destroyed. After leaving the hospital, he recuperated in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide".

Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries following a fall at his home and died in Manhattan on April 11, 2007.

Writing career

Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" appeared in the February 11, 1950 edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959. Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle (which in 1971 earned him a Master's Degree) to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device.

These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina.

:"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself. : :"I know," I said. : :"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said. : :"I know," I said.

Deadeye Dick, although mostly set in the mid-twentieth century, foreshadows the turbulent times of contemporary America; it ends prophetically with the lines "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet." The novel explores themes of social isolation and alienation that are particularly relevant in the postmodern world. Society is seen as openly hostile or indifferent at best, and popular culture as superficial and excessively materialistic.

Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.

Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.

In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused". In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel Cat's Cradle).

Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, his seminal short story "Harrison Bergeron" graphically demonstrates how an ethos like egalitarianism, when combined with too much authority, engenders horrific repression.

In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "So it goes", used ironically in reference to death, also originated in Slaughterhouse-Five. "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein." until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U. S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.

An August 2006 article reported:

:He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today — or so he claims. "I've given up on it... It won't happen... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"

Art career

Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III.

In 2004, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, for which he created an album cover for Phish called Hook, Line and Sinker, which has been included in a traveling exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Politics

Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them.

Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. (Although the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration.) His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.

With his columns for In These Times, he began a blistering attack on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In These Times quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected." In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities,or 'PPs.'" When asked how he was doing at the start of a 2003 interview, he replied: "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK."

He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied, "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your Race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"] from Horace's Odes, or possibly to Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his Dulce Et Decorum Est.) Nason took offense at Vonnegut's comments and characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." Vonnegut's son, Mark, responded to the article by writing an editorial to the Boston Globe in which he explained the reasons behind his father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."

A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone stated, " ... it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so ignorant.' " His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut had authored a freethought book titled Instruction in Morals, as well as an address for his own funeral in which he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book Palm Sunday, and identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion," declaring it a mystery as to how it was passed on to him. freethinker, humanist, agnostic,

Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought, and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. His ties to organized humanism included membership as a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism. In 1992, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007. In a letter to AHA members, Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."

Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation. Palm Sunday reproduces a sermon he delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts concerning William Ellery Channing, who was a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. In 1986, Vonnegut spoke to a gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, New York, and the text of his speech is reprinted in his book Fates Worse Than Death. Also reprinted in that book was a "mass" by Vonnegut, which was performed by a Unitarian Universalist choir in Buffalo, New York. Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars. he was nevertheless an ardent admirer, and believed that Jesus' Beatitudes informed his own humanist outlook. While he often identified himself as an agnostic or atheist, he also frequently spoke of God. as the first to be taped inside a virtual world, and it was the author's last face-to-face sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind's John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio as the program was taped. Vonnegut's virtual interview was taped in front of a virtual audience of 100 people from around the world at the virtual broadcast center created by producer Bill Lichtenstein and Lichtenstein Creative Media which produces The Infinite Mind. The 38-minute "machinima" video of Vonnegut's last interview is available on You Tube, and as of March 2010 it has had more than 100,000 views.

In 2007 Vonnegut is featured in the film Never Down as Robert and appears in several scenes.

Tributes

The 2009 Hollywood adaptation of Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", a film entitled 2081 is dedicated "To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."

At the annual Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library McFadden Memorial Lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis, on April 27, 2007, where Vonnegut was being honored posthumously, his son Mark delivered a speech that the author wrote for the event, and which was reported as the last thing he wrote. It ends with this: "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."

Following his death, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central gave Vonnegut a small tribute frame before the closing credits with his own famous phrase on death—"so it goes." There was also a short clip of him being interviewed by Jon Stewart, in which he joked that chlamydia, giraffes and hippopotamuses are evidence of evolution being controlled by a divine power.

Filmmaker Michael Moore included Vonnegut in the dedications for his 2007 film Sicko; at the end of the film, the words "Thank You Kurt Vonnegut for Everything" appear on the screen.

The satirical newspaper The Onion contained a tribute to Vonnegut soon after he died, with a reference to his work Slaughterhouse-Five stating that he shouldn't be referred to as dead "without checking Dresden for his younger self first." On November 11, 2007, Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, reintroduced Kurt's Mile High Malt to celebrate the late author's birthday. The beer was originally created by Vonnegut's grandfather, Albert Lieber, of the Indianapolis Brewery, using coffee as the secret ingredient. Kurt's Mile High Malt was first brewed in 1996 thanks to Wynkoop Founder and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a friend of Vonnegut's. At Vonnegut's request, coffee was added to the Mile High Malt, making it a close recreation to his grandfather's original.

When Vonnegut died, members of the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department in New York lowered the American flag to half mast, hung the funeral shroud, and rang a fire bell in accordance with the traditional 5-5-5 alarm used to honor fallen brothers. Vonnegut's name still appears on an old active fire-fighters roster, located next to a screen-print that he donated to the department.

The Indie band, Born Ruffians wrote a song called "Kurt Vonnegut".

Michigan pop punk group Fireworks wrote a song called "Geography, Vonnegut, and Me".

Dan Mangan's 2009 album "Nice Nice, Very Nice" is titled in reference to a calypso from Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle"

On January 29, 2011 the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library (www.vonnegutlibrary.org) will open in downtown Indianapolis. The location has various Vonnegut artifacts on display including his Smith-Corona typewriter, original screen prints, and the Purple Heart he was awarded after his experiences in Dresden during World War II.

Bibliography

References

External links

Vonnegut.com Kurt Vonnegut's official website

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

vonnegutsociety.net The Kurt Vonnegut Society website

Kurt Vonnegut papers at the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington

Category:1922 births Category:2007 deaths Category:Accidental deaths from falls Category:Accidental deaths in New York Category:American agnostics Category:American anti-Iraq War activists Category:American anarchists Category:American atheists Category:American essayists Category:American humanists Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:American novelists Category:American pacifists Category:American prisoners of war Category:American satirists Category:American science fiction writers Category:American short story writers Category:American socialists Category:American tax resisters Category:American Unitarian Universalists Category:Cornell University alumni Category:General Electric people Category:American writers of German descent Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:People from Barnstable, Massachusetts Category:People from Indianapolis, Indiana Category:People who attempted suicide Category:Postmodern literature Category:Postmodernists Category:Recipients of the Purple Heart medal Category:United States Army soldiers Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:University of Iowa faculty Category:World War II prisoners of war held by Germany Category:Writers from Indiana Category:Writers from Massachusetts Category:Writers who illustrated their own writing

Name	Jon Stewart
Caption	Stewart at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, October 30, 2010.
Alma mater	William & Mary
Birth name	Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz
Birth date	November 28, 1962
Birth place	New York City, New York, U.S.
Medium	Stand-up, television, film, books
Nationality	American
Active	1987–present
Genre	Satire/political satire/news satire, observational comedy
Subject	Mass media/news media/Media criticism, American politics, current events, religion, Jewish culture, race relations, human sexuality, self-deprecation
Influences	George Carlin, Woody Allen, David Letterman, Steve Martin, is an American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian. He is widely known as host of The Daily Show, a satirical news program that airs on Comedy Central.

In January 2005, CNN announced that it was canceling Crossfire. When asked about the cancellations, CNN/US' incoming President, Jonathan Klein, referenced Stewart's appearance on the show: "I think he made a good point about the noise level of these types of shows, which does nothing to illuminate the issues of the day." Soon after, Stewart quipped on The Daily Show that "I fought the law, and the law lost!"

When asked about his relationship with Tucker Carlson on CNN's Larry King Live in February 2008, Stewart said: "It became this idea that it was personal between the two of us, and it wasn't... If there's one thing I regret about that thing, it was probably the idea that it was personal, that there was something I was saying about Tucker to Tucker, but actually it was about the show."

On March 18, 2009, Carlson wrote a blog entry for The Daily Beast criticizing Stewart for his handling of the CNBC controversy (see below). In this article, Carlson discusses the CNN incident and claims Stewart remained backstage for at least "an hour" and "continued to lecture our staff", something Carlson described as "one of the weirdest things I have ever seen."

Criticism of CNBC

Stewart again became a viral internet phenomenon following a March 4, 2009, The Daily Show sequence. CNBC cancelled Rick Santelli's scheduled appearance but Stewart still ran a short segment showing CNBC giving bad investment advice.

Subsequent media coverage of exchanges between Jim Cramer, who had been featured heavily in the original segment, and Stewart, led to a highly anticipated face-to-face confrontation on The Daily Show. The episode received a large amount of media hype and became the second most-viewed episode of The Daily Show, trailing only the 2009 Inauguration Day episode. It had 2.3 million total viewers, and the next day, the show's website saw its highest day of traffic in 2009. Although Cramer acknowledged on the show that some of Stewart's criticisms of CNBC were valid and that they could "do better," he later said on the "Today" Show that Stewart's criticism of the media was "naïve and misleading."

Criticism of Fox News

For years, Stewart has regularly accused Fox News of distorting the news to fit a conservative agenda, at one point ridiculing the network as “the meanest sorority in the world.” In November 2009, Stewart called out Fox News for using some footage from a previous Tea Party rally during its report of a more recent one, making the later rally appear larger than it was. The show's anchor, Sean Hannity, apologized the following night. A month later, Stewart criticized Fox & Friends cohost Gretchen Carlson – a former Miss America and Stanford graduate – for claiming that she googled words such as "ignoramus" and "czar." Stewart believed that Carlson was dumbing herself down for "an audience who sees intellect as an elitist flaw.”

Stewart stepped up his criticism of Fox News in 2010; as of April 24, The Daily Show had 24 segments criticizing Fox News′ coverage. Moments later, Stewart defended his assertion: On April 30, 2009, Stewart apologized on his program, and stated he did not believe Truman was a war criminal: }}

Books

in New York.]]In 1998, Stewart released his first book, Naked Pictures of Famous People, a collection of humorous short stories and essays. The book reached The New York Times Best Seller List.

In 2004, Stewart and The Daily Show writing staff released , a mock high school history textbook offering insights into the unique American system of government, dissecting its institutions, explaining its history and processes, and satirizing such popular American political precepts as "one man, one vote", "government by the people," and "every vote counts." The book sold millions of copies upon its 2004 release and ended the year as a top fifteen best-seller.

Film and television acting

Although best known for his work on The Daily Show, Stewart has also had roles in several films and television series.

His first film role was a minor part in The First Wives Club but his scene was deleted. In 1995, Stewart signed a three-year deal with Miramax. He played romantic leads in the films Playing by Heart and Wishful Thinking. He also had supporting roles in the romantic comedy Since You've Been Gone and in the horror film The Faculty. Other films were planned for Stewart to write and star in, but they were never produced. Stewart has since maintained a relationship with Miramax founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein and continues to appear in films they have produced including Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Doogal and the documentary Wordplay.

He also appeared in Half Baked as an "enhancement smoker" and in Big Daddy as Adam Sandler's roommate; he has joked on the Daily Show and in the documentary The Aristocrats that to get the role he slept with Sandler. Stewart often makes fun of his appearances in the high-profile flop Death to Smoochy, in which he played a treacherous television executive, and the animated film Doogal, where he played a blue spring named Zeebad that shot a freeze ray from his mustache. In 2007, Stewart made a cameo appearance as himself in Evan Almighty, which starred former Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell. In the movie, Stewart was seen on a television screen in a fictional Daily Show episode poking fun at Carell's character for building an ark.

Stewart had a recurring role in The Larry Sanders Show in which he played himself as an occasional substitute and possible successor to late-night talk show host Larry Sanders (played by Garry Shandling). In 1998, Stewart hosted the television special, Elmopalooza, celebrating 30 years of Sesame Street. He has guest-starred on other sitcoms such as The Nanny, Dr Katz, Professional Therapist, Spin City, NewsRadio, American Dad, and The Simpsons. He has also made guest-appearances on the children's television series Between the Lions, Sesame Street and Jack's Big Music Show.

Producing

In the mid-1990s, Stewart launched his own production company named Busboy Productions. The name of the company is a reference to Stewart's previous job as a busboy. The company's production logo features the sound of a glass being knocked over followed by a voice whispering "Oops. Sorry." Stewart signed a deal with Miramax to develop projects through his company, but none of his ideas were ever produced. After Stewart's success as host and producer of The Daily Show, he revived Busboy Productions with Daily Show producers Ben Karlin and Rich Korson. In 2002, Busboy planned to produce a sitcom for NBC starring Stephen Colbert, but the show did not come to fruition.

In 2005, Comedy Central reached an agreement with Busboy to finance the production company. Comedy Central has a first-look agreement on all projects, then Busboy is free to shop them to other networks. The deal spawned the Daily Show spin-off The Colbert Report. Other projects include the sitcom pilot Three Strikes, the documentary Sportsfan, the series Important Things with Demetri Martin, and the film The Donor.

WGA strike of 2007–2008

Stewart was an important factor in the unionization of the writers for Comedy Central. The Daily Show writers were the first of Comedy Central's writers to be able to join the guild, after which other shows followed.

He supported the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, commenting on The Daily Show episode just before the strike in a sarcastic manner about how Comedy Central had made available all of the episodes for free on their website, but without advertising, and said 'go support our advertisers'. The show went on hiatus when the strike began, as did other late night talk shows. Upon Stewart's return to the show on January 7, 2008, he refused to use the title The Daily Show, stating that "The Daily Show" was the show made with all of the people responsible for the broadcast, including his writers. During the strike, he referred to his show as A Daily Show with Jon Stewart until the strike ended on February 13, 2008. Stewart, as well as several other late night talk shows, returned to TV early in January even though the strike was not over, because their stage crews and production teams were suffering much more than the writers from the financial crunch, and by that point had been out of work for two months.

The Writers Guild Strike of 2007–2008 was also responsible for a notable mock feud among Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Conan O'Brien in early 2008. Without writers to help fuel their witty banter, the three comedians concocted a crossover/rivalry in order to garner more viewers during the ratings slump. Stephen Colbert made the claim that because of "the Colbert bump", he was responsible for Mike Huckabee's success in the 2008 presidential race. Conan O'Brien claimed that he was responsible for Huckabee's success because not only had he made mention of him on his show, but also that he was responsible for Chuck Norris' success (Norris backed Huckabee). In response, Stewart claimed that he was responsible for the success of O'Brien, since Stewart had featured him on The Jon Stewart Show, and in turn the success of Huckabee. This resulted in a three-part comedic battle between the three pundits, with all three appearing on each other's shows. The feud ended on Late Night with Conan O'Brien with a mock brawl involving the three talk-show hosts.

Honors

Stewart and the rest of the members of The Daily Show have received two Peabody Awards for "" and "", covering the 2000 presidential election and the 2004 presidential election, respectively.

In the December 2003 New Years edition of Newsweek, Stewart was named the "Who's Next?" person for the coming year of 2004, with the magazine predicting he would emerge as an absolute sensation in that year. (The magazine said they were right at the end of that year.)

Entertainment Weekly named Stewart as its "Entertainer of the Year" for 2004.

In 2004, Stewart spoke at the commencement ceremonies at his alma mater, William and Mary, and received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree. Stewart was also the Class Day keynote speaker at Princeton University in 2004, and the 2008 Sacerdote Great Names speaker at Hamilton College.

In 2000, when he was labeled a "Democrat," he generally agreed, but described his political affiliation as "more socialist or independent" than Democratic.

Asteroid 116939 Jonstewart, discovered April 15, 2004, is named in his honor.

Stewart was also named one of the 2005 Time 100, an annual list of 100 of the most influential people of the year by Time Magazine.

In addition, Stewart and The Daily Show received the 2005 NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.

Stewart was presented an Honorary All-America award by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) in 2006.

On April 21, 2009, President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf made Stewart a chief.

On October 26, 2010, Stewart was named the Most Influential Man of 2010 by AskMen.com.

Grammy Awards

Stewart has hosted the Grammys twice, in 2001 and in 2002. In the middle of the 2001 broadcast – after laying a number of comedic duds – Stewart did what he encourages most public officials to do, and owned up to his bad hosting, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to say I feel your scorn and accept it." When Stewart returned to host the next year, his comedy was more successful. Joking about the performance of the song "Lady Marmalade", he said, "Our next performance is from the movie Moulin Rouge!, a film about a time when the whorehouses were about the music!" When the award winners for Album of the Year walked up on stage, many in number, Stewart quipped, "I don't know what you may have heard, but you were only supposed to go on stage if you worked on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, not if you heard it."

Oscars

On January 5, 2006, Stewart was officially announced as the host of the 78th Academy Awards, which were held March 5 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. Responding to press questions at the time of his selection, Stewart remarked: "As a performer, I'm truly honored to be hosting the show. Although, as an avid watcher of the Oscars, I can't help but be a little disappointed with the choice. It appears to be another sad attempt to smoke out Billy Crystal." (According to The New York Times, Oscar producer Gil Cates knew Crystal was going to be performing 700 Sundays during the time period and was not able to host.) On the Monday before the Oscars, Stewart told Larry King that he was more "excited" than nervous about the job and joked that if he turned out a failure, he could be "bumped down to public access". When asked what the opening would be, the comedian chastised himself by comparing a Stewart opening to a "Gene Rayburn homage". Instead, the opening segment, preceding Stewart's monologue, featured several recent hosts "declining" to host the show.

Critical response to Stewart's performance was mixed. Roger Ebert compared him favorably to legendary Oscar host Johnny Carson. Other reviewers were less positive; Tom Shales of The Washington Post said that Stewart hosted with “smug humorlessness.” James Poniewozik of Time said that Stewart was a bad host, but a great “anti-host” in that he poked fun at parts of the broadcast that deserved it, which lent him a degree of authenticity with the non-Hollywood audience. Stewart and correspondent John Oliver later poked fun at his lackluster reception on The Daily Show's coverage of the 79th Academy Awards by saying that the "demon of last year's Oscars had finally been exorcised."

Stewart also hosted the 80th Academy Awards on February 24, 2008. Reception this time, however, was far more positive.

Personal life

In 2000, Stewart married Tracey McShane, his girlfriend of four years. The couple met on a blind date set up by a production assistant on Stewart's film, Wishful Thinking. On June 19, 2001, Stewart and his wife filed a joint name change application and legally changed both of their surnames to "Stewart." He proposed to his future wife through a personalized crossword puzzle created with the help of Will Shortz, the crossword editor at The New York Times. The couple had their first child, Nathan Thomas Stewart (named after Stewart's grandfather), They also have a cat named Stanley and two pit bull terriers, Monkey and Shamsky (named after former Major League Baseball player Art Shamsky).

Filmography

Bibliography

Naked Pictures of Famous People (Rob Weisbach Books, 1998) ISBN 0688171621

(Warner Books, September 2004) ISBN 0-446-53268-1

(Grand Central Publishing, 2010) ISBN 978-0446579223

References

External links

in 2010 in 2005 in 2004

Collected news and commentary at The New York Times

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