Stephen Spruiell interviews Neil Cavuto on the launch of the new Fox Business Channel:

Cavuto adds, however, that sometimes the controversy works in his favor. “I’ve heard it said that, particularly at Fox News Channel, a lot of people watch simply because they hate us. My response to that is, ‘Do they have a Nielson Box?’”

“So I don’t really care,” Cavuto says, “but I do think that any impartial observer would look at how we’re presenting business information on Fox Business Network and come away with [the impression that] this isn’t about elephants or donkeys. This isn’t about red or blue. This is about green, and helping people make more of it.”

Cavuto says that one reason that Fox News and now Fox Business have drawn so much scrutiny is that both networks are often willing to break from the media consensus. Of the biggest story in the business world right now, the trouble in the subprime mortgage market, he says most of the media’s hysterical coverage isn’t justified by the facts.

“I do think the media have way, way, way overstated the severity of this situation,” he says. “To hear most of the media tell it, you’d think that every mortgage was melting down. In fact, that’s a popular term, to call it ‘the mortgage meltdown.’ It’s an expression I’ve forbidden to use here at FBN, because if you’re going to say ‘meltdown,’ you’d better damn well tell me that every house in America is under lava.

“The statistics are quite the opposite,” he says. “Ninety-six percent of all mortgages are still being paid on time. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a great deal of pain out there. There are a lot of folks in trouble, but not all folks. The same thing applies to the subprime mortgage situation. You’d think that everyone who has a subprime mortgage is a delinquent, yet close to 9 out of 10 of them are paying their mortgages back on time. And subprime mortgages, which is a bad name for them, gave young people opportunities to buy homes that, when I was a young guy, would never have been afforded to me in my life.

“So it’s not all bad,” he says, “but the media leave that little part out, because that little inconvenient truth doesn’t fit in with the one that they want to push, which is that we’re going to hell in a handbasket… but that’s the kind of stuff I want to elicit out of my guests. I want to get a timetable of where they see things going, how big a problem this is. I let it be known that I think this issue has been overstated, but guests can come on and argue it with me. Many have. But that’s how the network serves viewers. We want to debate these issues, to get beyond the consensus views and be a little contrarian.”