JUAN WILLIAMS: My wife thought I was crazy to join Fox News. I'm glad I did

My wife said I was crazy.

This was 1996, thirty years ago.

I worked for the established brand name in cable television, CNN.

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Why then, she asked, with three young school-age children still at home, was I willing to give up that prime seat to join a start-up cable network being launched by a controversial Australian media mogul, Rupert Murdoch?

And this start-up Fox News Channel faced an uphill fight just to get on cable systems in big cities, including New York.

"Crazy!" Yes! But I told her they were going to be scrappy, innovative, and give me a foothold on the ground floor of the next era of news.

So, I went with the new kids in cable news.

And Fox delivered over the last 30 years by doing news for people who did not watch news. Fox is now often the number one channel of any kind on cable.

From the early days, the screen has been full of colorful graphics. Stories come and go fast. Heroes and villains are clear-cut. Crime stories and war stories took center stage — no matter where they occurred.

The on-air people did not speak down to the audience as experts. They talked to them as friends and neighbors, always shaking their heads at a crazy world.

As Brit Hume, now Fox's chief political analyst, told me at the start, Fox was willing to do stories being ignored by the news networks and cable outlets. He said Fox News was picking up money others left on the street.

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On top of being daring, Fox had the novel idea of featuring right-of-center voices, Republican political players who generally felt like outsiders on the other networks.

Roger Ailes, the first head of the network, knew politics. He was a top GOP consultant. And his top programming aide, Chet Collier, a Democrat, had been Ailes' mentor at the popular daytime talk show, "The Mike Douglas Show."

They sold me on Fox, and they knew exactly what they were getting with me. I'd worked at The Washington Post and CNN. In bestselling books, I called out politicians on the right and the left.

And as a Black journalist, I was known to trade punches with Black politicians.

Fox's founders wanted me to trade punches with their right-wing media personalities. I was happy to get in on the action.

From the start, Fox made good television. Ratings slowly climbed as viewers discovered turn-up-the-volume debates among finger-pointing, smirking, laughing, and eye-rolling personalities.

Fox was in the right place as bombshell revelations hit the air about the president of the United States having a sexual relationship with a White House intern.

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The impeachment of a president included nightly stories about the popular President Clinton facing a hard-edged prosecutor, Kenneth Starr. And then came provocative reports about a blue dress and cigars. The ratings climbed.

What I remember most about those early years of Fox is being on set in the D.C. bureau with Brit Hume, then the managing editor. He held the air for hours of hearings and press conferences. I was by his side as we struggled with new equipment, technicians discovering buttons, and producers shouting breaking news into our earpieces.

The same chaos followed when "

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