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Brit Hume (born June 22, 1943) is the managing editor of the Fox News Channel. He hosts Special Report with Brit Hume and is a panelist on Fox News Sunday. Hume graduated from the University of Virginia, and is married to Kim Schiller Hume, Fox News's Washington bureau chief.
Career
Hume was born in Washington, D.C. He first worked for United Press International, the Hartford Times and the Baltimore Evening Sun. Later, Hume worked for ABC for 23 years from 1973 to 1996, when he went to work for Fox News Channel. From 1973 to 1976, Hume worked as a consultant for the documentary division. From 1976 to 1988, Hume worked as Capitol Hill correspondent; in 1989, he became White House chief correspondent. In 1991, Hume won an Emmy Award for his Gulf War coverage; in December 1996, he left ABC for Fox News. By the time Hume had left he had worked on many ABC shows, including, World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, Nightline and This Week. Hume has published two books: His 1971 Death and the Mines: Rebellion and Murder in the United Mine Workers and the 1974 Inside Story. Hume has contributed to the The Weekly Standard, a conservative weekly newsmagazine.
In February 1998, Hume's 28-year-old son Sandy committed suicide by gunshot from a hunting rifle to the head.
Controversy
Hume has long been the subject of controversy, as far back as the 1980s, when he playing tennis with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush while an ABC reporter.
Hume also has come under fire more recently for comments made on air. One such comment was on August 26, 2003, regarding the loss of life during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq:
- "Two hundred seventy-seven U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that statistically speaking U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size. The most recent statistics indicate California has more than 2300 homicides each year, which means about 6.6 murders each day. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have been in Iraq for 160 days, which means they're incurring about 1.7 deaths, including illness and accidents each day."
Opponents attacked the factual accuracy of Hume's statement, pointing out that while someone in California has a 1 in 5.2 million chance of being murdered every day, a soldier in Iraq has a 1 in 113,000 chance of dying every day. This means that at the time of Hume's statement, the chances of a soldier in Iraq dying were 46 times greater than the chance of a Californian being murdered. Hume has also been criticized for statements made June 2, 2004, on 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." .
In this statement, Hume criticizes the Washington Post report on negative political ads, saying that the newspaper ignored negative ads run by John Kerry. Hume says that the Post should have gone further back, counting negative political ads made during the primary season. However, even if the Post had done that, it would have showed that Bush had run 71 percent more negative ads than has Kerry in one-third of the time. Opponents charge that this statement by Hume was an attempt to mislead viewers, remarking, "Indeed, if Bush had been running ads at his current pace since Kerry ran his first ad, his current negative ad total would be approximately 147,000 -- 413 percent greater than Kerry's current total" .
Hume has also been critized for statements made on the March 28, 2004 edition Fox News Sunday. During the show, Chris Wallace and Hume were discussing critism of a joke made by President George W. Bush. The joke referred to the lack of weapons of mass destruction found after the invasion of Iraq:
- Chris Wallace: "And one that got a big laugh in the room that day -- and I must say, I still think it's funny -- the day after, some Democrats and the families of some American soldiers in Iraq, some who died in Iraq, said they were offended by this kidding about the missing weapons of mass destruction. Brit?"
- Brit Hume: "Well, we have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.
- "And in America today, if your sensibilities are offended by something that has happened, you get an enormous amount of credibility and are taken very seriously.
- "My own view of this is, the president's there poking fun at himself over what goes down, I think, as one of his failures. And I thought it was a good-natured performance, and it made him look good only in the sense that it showed he could poke fun at himself. But he certainly doesn't disguise the record on weapons of mass destruction.
- And you have to feel like saying to people, "'Just get over it.'"
Critics charge that Hume's statement was offensive to the families of soldiers who died during the Iraq war.