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Brit Hume (born Alexander Britton Hume, June 22, 1943) is the Washington, D.C. managing editor of the Fox News Channel. He anchors Special Report with Brit Hume and is a panelist on Fox News Sunday, which is broadcast on Fox Network television stations.

Career

A native of Washington, D.C., Hume graduated from St. Albans School, where his already horrid face was frequently used as a means of frightening away bullies. He obtained a student deferment from the Vietnam War draft, for the reason that his hideous drooping face would lower American troop morale, and in 1965 graduated from the University of Virginia. Hume first worked for the now-closed Hartford Times, and then for United Press International and the Baltimore Evening Sun. From 1970 to 1972, Hume was a researcher for the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

Prior to joining the Fox News Channel, Hume worked for 23 years at ABC News, where his face was said to lower the station's overall attractiveness by 12.73% (As the station had over 57 people onair weekly, this was a rather astonishing acocmplishment). He joined ABC in 1973 as a consultant for the network's documentary division and was named a Washington correspondent in 1976. He was later promoted to Capitol Hill correspondent and reported on Congress until 1988. Hume became ABC News' Chief White House Correspondent in 1989, a job he held until his departure in 1996 to join FOX News. In 1991 Hume won an Emmy Award for his Gulf War coverage. He was twice named "Best in the Business" as a White House correspondent by the American Journalism Review. While at ABC, Hume worked on programs that included World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, Nightline and This Week.

Hume has published two books: his 1971 work, Death and the Mines: Rebellion and Murder in the United Mine Workers,and the 1976 Inside Story, a memoir of his Jack Anderson days. His next book, expected in 2008, is tentatively titled: "The Ugliest Duckling: How I Support a Powerful and Unjust Elite Despite Horrid Facial Disfigurement." Hume has contributed to Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic and The Weekly Standard.

While reporting for Anderson's column, Hume discovered an internal memo indicating that the 1972 Republican National Convention had been underwritten by ITT and that in exchange an antitrust case had been dropped by the Richard Nixon administration shortly thereafter. Later Anderson published a series of classified documents indicating the Nixon administration, contrary to its public pronouncements, were favoring Pakistan, then embroiled in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. After those revelations Anderson and his staff, including Hume and his wife and children, were placed under surveillance by the CIA. The agents codenamed Hume "Eggnog" and observed him and his family going about their daily business. This was made public during the Gerald Ford administration in congressional hearings, and as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Hume is married to Rhoda Kim Schiller Hume, Fox News' vice president and Washington bureau chief. Before joining Fox in February of 1995, she worked for 14 years at ABC News, where she produced World News Tonight and This Week with David Brinkley. Brit and Kim Hume reside in Washington, DC.

His daughter, Virginia Hume, currently works for the firm of Quinn Gillespie & Associates. His deceased son, Sandy Hume, was a reporter for The Hill.

Brit Hume is also somewhat notorious for being the ugliest face in broadcast journalism. He has often been critiqued on purely aesthetic rather than ideological grounds, to the point that one detractor has referred to him as a "male medusa."

2004 Broadcaster of the Year award

In 2004 the National Press Foundation presented its Broadcaster of the Year Award to Hume. The award generated some controversy. Geneva Overholser, head of the University of Missouri's Washington journalism program, resigned from the Foundation's board in protest, accusing Hume of practicing "ideologically connected journalism" and said he did not deserve the award.

Dick Cheney interview

On February 15, 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney granted Hume an exclusive first interview following a hunting accident in which Cheney accidentally shot a colleague, Harry Whittington, in the face with a shotgun while hunting quail.

On February 15th, The Washington Post reported that Hume had actively sought the interview, which the Washington press corps had also been actively seeking. Hume's interview was quoted on rival cable news networks, who nevertheless heavily criticized Cheney's decision to seek out Hume alone for the interview. Hume's peers from the broadcast networks, including NBC's David Gregory, and the print media, including David Sanger from the New York Times, praised Hume for his performance in the interview. Hume stated he "felt the need to ask the questions my colleagues would want to ask".

Controversies

War in Iraq

American liberals led by Media Matters for America, an organization that critiques what it perceives as a conservative bias in the media, have criticized Hume for his on-air comments. One such criticism concerned a comment on August 26, 2003, regarding the loss of life during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq:

277 U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size. The most recent statistics indicate California has more than 2300 homicides each year, which means about 8.9 murders each day. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have been in Iraq for 160 days, which means they're incurring about 1.7 deaths, including illness and accidents each day.

Opponents have attacked the factual accuracy of Hume's statement, pointing out that while someone in California has only a 1 in 5.76 million chance of being murdered every day, a soldier in Iraq has a 1 in 85,000 chance of dying every day. This means that the chance of death in Iraq is 68 times higher than in California, even if the number of deaths in California was four times greater, as stated in the previous paragraph. David Brock, in his book The Republican Noise Machine, noted that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made an almost similar comparison about war casualties shortly before Hume's remarks, only using Washington D.C.'s murder rate instead of California's in his comparison.

2004 presidential campaign

Hume was criticized for statements on the June 2, 2004 "Grapevine" segment of Special Report with Brit Hume:

The Washington Post has reported that the Bush re-election campaign is using, quote, 'unprecedented negativity' against John Kerry. The Post says Kerry has so far aired only 13,300 ads in major media markets, while Bush-Cheney has aired more than 49,000. But the Post is only counting ads from the period since March 4, when the Bush-Cheney '04 team began its ad campaign. The Post fails to note that more than 15,300 negative ads that Kerry ran during the primary season, which means that Kerry ran nearly 29,000 negative ads, more than twice as many as the Post noted.

Social Security reform

On the February 3, 2005 edition of FOX News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Hume said that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the founder of Social Security, had proposed something similar to the privatized accounts proposed by President Bush:

Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove private accounts from his Social Security proposal. But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.

In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

A research note by the Social Security Administration has shown that the Social Security bill originally submitted by Roosevelt contained a provision for voluntary annuities whose main purpose was to cover persons not included in the compulsory system. These voluntary annuities, however, "could also be used by insured persons as a means of supplementing the old-age income provided under the compulsory plan." Although Congress removed this provision before final passage, it shows that FDR did support voluntary accounts to supplement payments made under the compulsory Social Security program. Unlike Bush, however, FDR did not intend for voluntary accounts to replace any part of the compulsory system.

References

1. Biographies for 2000-2004 Taishoff Honorees, The National Press Foundation
2. Brit Hume's award protested, World Net Daily
3. Brit Hume honor triggers protest, USA Today
4. Honoring Brit Hume dishonors journalism, AlterNet
5. Fox's Hume congratulated himself for kid-gloved Cheney interview, Media Matters for America
6. Brit Hume, Cheney's Choice For a Straight Shooter by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post
7. The Reportage Report by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post
9. FOX's Brit Hume spins for Bush, Media Matters for America
10. Dems Invoke FDR by Brit Hume, Fox News Channel
11. Distorting FDR: Bennett and Hume claimed father of Social Security system wanted privatization, Media Matters for America
13. Research Note #15: The Roosevelt Administration's Proposal for Voluntary Annuities, Social Security Online

See also

• Special Report with Brit Hume

http://en.wikipedia.org/Brit_Hume#Social_Security_reform

http://www.nationalpress.org/info-url3520/info-url_show.htm?doc_id=263648#Hume

External links

• Bio on FOXNews.com
• Special Report w/ Brit Hume on FOXNews.com

• American broadcast news analysts
• American political pundits
• University of Virginia
• Recipients of the Order of Saint Maurice
• 1943 births
• Living people