NEW YORK — With just a handful of days left in the 2008 presidential campaign, one would assume that Brit Hume, managing editor of Fox News’ Washington bureau, would be preoccupied with voter turnout models and battleground state maps.
But Hume is already thinking about how he’ll be spending his time after Tuesday. Before the end of the year, the television news veteran will step down from the anchor desk and his long-running show, “Special Report.”
“Family is a big piece of it,” he said of his retirement plans recently. “And Christ is a big piece of it. And golf is a big piece of it.” Hume said he had long planned to cut his workload when he turned 65. His resolve was strengthened as he helmed the campaign coverage this season and found his zeal for the story ebbing.
“The absolute, indispensable ingredient is enthusiasm,” he said. “I started to lose mine. This stuff exhausts me as much as it excites me.” The most draining aspect: the ugliness that has come to dominate political debate.
“The whole general tone of politics in this country has turned so sour and so bitter and so partisan,” he said, his gravelly baritone more morose than usual. “It makes news, but after a while, it’s dispiriting to cover it.”
The rancor must be particularly harsh to offend Hume, who has been steeped in Washington stories for much of his 43 years as a journalist, covering nine presidential campaigns.
After starting out at the Hartford Times and Baltimore Evening Sun, Hume worked for investigative columnist Jack Anderson, from whom he said he learned “how to smell a story that isn’t right.” He took that instinct to ABC News, where he spent 23 years, including eight as the network’s White House correspondent, before he was recruited by Roger Ailes to join the nascent Fox News Channel in 1996.
“From the minute he got here, he gave us instant credibility,” said Ailes, the network’s chief executive.
At Fox News, Hume has long been the elder statesman, lending gravitas to an upstart network that has fought pugnaciously for respect. His afternoon program, which has bested its cable news competitors for the past seven years, drew its biggest audience ever in September, averaging 2.2 million viewers.
Network executives acknowledge he will be difficult to replace.
“Fox News, which shook up cable news by spotlighting outspoken conservative commentators, has “given a lot of people who were probably disgusted or fed up with what they were seeing a place to go,” he said.
