Fox News's Snow to Become New White House Press Secretary

He has told associates he plans to function as an advocate for reporters, an approach that would run counter to the administration's previous philosophy about the position.

The question of whether to take the job -- which includes a substantial cut from his media earnings, to $161,000 -- weighed so heavily on Snow that he lost several pounds in a week. His doctors, who refashioned his small intestine to function as a colon, had given him the green light to take the job; one joked that it might give him heartburn but not cancer.

William Kristol, who worked with Snow in the White House of George H.W. Bush and was a regular panelist on "Fox News Sunday" when Snow anchored the show, invoked the Fox News slogan in saying: "It will be good to have a fair and balanced press secretary.

"An outsider with a somewhat happy-go-lucky attitude could help externally, but also internally," said Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, because staffers tend to get "so defensive after years of getting pummeled." He said Snow could also carry Bush's message on the airwaves, adding that "this White House has been amazingly negligent in putting spokesmen out day after day on radio and television."

The genial Snow, a native of Cincinnati, has served as a USA Today columnist, editorial page editor of the Washington Times, deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit News and frequent substitute for radio host Rush Limbaugh.

As a White House staffer in 1991, Snow once tried to get Bush impersonator Dana Carvey to speak to White House speechwriters so they could better understand the 41st president's syntax.

At "Fox News Sunday," which Snow launched in 1996, he tried to balance a neutral moderator's role with the aggressive conservatism he espoused in his newspaper column. At the 2000 Republican convention, Fox executives reprimanded Snow for speaking to a GOP youth group. They persuaded him to drop the column the next year.

On the program, Snow interviewed candidate George W. Bush in 2000 and, later, such top officials as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Snow was eased out of the job in 2003 in favor of Chris Wallace, and was given a weekend television show and a radio program that is also heard on XM and Sirius satellite radio.

Snow has largely been supportive of the Bush administration, especially concerning its anti-terrorism efforts, but has occasionally criticized the president for deviating from conservative goals. In February, he called Bush's domestic policy "timid" and "listless" and said Bush's abandonment of his Social Security privatization plan was "an act of surrender."

In December, Snow told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that "the lack of spending discipline on the part of Republicans has been disappointing, and frankly so has George W. Bush's inability to understand the importance of using a veto."

Snow has already gotten a taste of the job as a "piñata," as he put it last week. In his latest column, he wrote: "Helpful correspondents have told me where to go, what to use to fill various orifices, which pack animal I most closely resemble and my next-world destination."

Political researcher Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.