Bill Hemmer Roy Rochlin/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Earlier this week, Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer found himself inside Gaza, near the Egyptian border and the town or Rafah, or what used to be Rafah. "That town has been reduced to rubble, there is very little if anything, that stands of Rafah today," Hemmer said in a report for his program Tuesday. Hemmer, the co-anchor of America's Newsroom alongside Dana Perino, was embedded with an aid group, staffed by former U.S. special forces, and supported by IDF snipers, who were delivering food inside Gaza, with Hemmer noting the hunger facing the Palestinians they encountered, and acknowledging the limited window they had into what was happening there. Related Stories Business Fox One Streaming Service Launch Date and Pricing Revealed Business Fox Ad Revenue Rises, Driven by Tubi and Fox News "This morning, we only saw a small part of this war, a small part of Gaza, a small part of this story. And one day does not make the entire story for this ongoing war," he told Perino. On Thursday, he made international news in an interview with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who replied "we intend to" when Hemmer asked whether Israel would take control of the entire Gaza strip. Hemmer also pressed the Prime Minister about allowing independent press to report from inside Gaza. A week or so earlier, however, Hemmer was dodging tourists and office workers (as well as a few stray climate change protestors) on the Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan, explaining to The Hollywood Reporter his approach to delivering the news. "In the cable news world, we want to take people to a fair representation of what is happening at that minute," Hemmer says. "So when I'm walking into the studio with Dana, I want to take the rundown, and throw it out the window. I want the audience to know that something is happening, we're on top of it. You stay with us, and we'll take you through it." It is an approach that can be traced back to his first day at Fox News, 20 years ago this month. A veteran of local TV, Hemmer had subsequently joined CNN as an anchor and correspondent, but he left the channel to join Fox, which had emerged by then as the clear ratings leader in cable news. He had a start date set, but began his new job a few days early to help the channel cover Hurricane Katrina, which was about to make landfall in New Orleans. "I remember my boss at the time, Bill Shine, called me up and said, 'Hemmer, how about starting tonight?'" the anchor recalls. Bill Hemmer in the field reporting for Fox News as the network covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Fox News It was a transformative moment for Hemmer, who was not only covering one of the biggest news stories of that decade, but ingrained in him a skill that helps explain why he (and for that matter Fox News writ large) has been so successful in retaining its audience: The ability to keep the story going, in real-time, on-air. "I think radio hosts have that ability. I think sportscasters have that ability - by the way, I started in sports, and maybe that's a little bit ingrained in me - but my colleagues have the ability to take just a little bit of information and expand on it, keep it on TV, it allows us to keep the story on the screen for a longer period of time, and the net effect is we can reach reporters, we can reach officials," Hemmer says. And it is a skill that still appears to be in vogue, even as the media landscape has shifted so vastly over the past 20 years, with social media platforms TikTok-ifying news content in to smaller and smaller bites. "Well, if that's our competition, we have to be as fast as they are," Hemmer says, acknowledging that he has had to adapt accordingly: "I'm still old school. I still need to print things out, I need to highlight. I need to write questions in the columns and come back on the stuff I am consuming. I am tactile." A recent episode of America's Newsroom underscored how Fox has reacted to that threat. Hemmer and co-host Dana Perino deftly weaved between a flurry of stories, from the silly (delivery robots in Los Angeles! A kitten in the New York City subway!) to the substantive (an update on the midtown Manhattan shooter, a segment about President Biden's pardons). And along the way Hemmer and Perino helped the show make news: They hosted the CEO of the Tunnel to Towers Foundation in the studio, where he pledged to cover living expenses and education costs for the family of NYPD Officer Didarul Islam, who was killed in the midtown shooting. And they grilled Senate Majority Leader John Thune in a live interview, using comments that President Trump said in a press gaggle aboard Air Force One to press the Senator on confirming judges, and whether further sanctions on Russia were coming