When media baron Rupert Murdoch announced in 1995 that he was creating the Fox News Channel, CNN founder Ted Turner smirked that he was “looking forward to squishing Rupert like a bug.” A few months later, when Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to run the channel, The New York Times sniffed that Fox News was just something for Ailes to play with – “less a toy than an imaginary friend.”

Today, as Fox News celebrates 10 years on the air, there won’t be any cracks about insects or Erector Sets: It’s the No. 1 cable-news network, as it has been for the past 58 months, with an audience almost as big as its two main competitors combined. It took Fox News just five years to surpass MSNBC, with its powerful corporate backers, and CNN, which had a 16-year head start.

The top five cable news programs, and 13 of the top 14, are on Fox News. Its ratings rank it among the top 10 cable networks all day long. Cable operators, at first dismissive, now consider it a must-have – it reached the 90-million-subscriber mark faster than any cable channel in history, faster than MTV, faster than ESPN, faster than CNN.

Numbers be damned, Ailes grumbles darkly, Fox News has failed: “The other guys are still in business.”

That’s a joke, probably, though it’s never wise to underestimate Ailes’ competitive bloodlust. (When CNN beat him in a legal scrap for the services of anchor Paula Zahn, Ailes said it didn’t matter – Fox News could put “a dead raccoon on the air” opposite Zahn and still get more viewers.) But Ailes is serious when he says he expects his network to do more.

“We view this as the start of the next 10 years, not the end of the first 10,” Ailes says. “Fox News hasn’t taken enough viewers away from the broadcast networks. It hasn’t yet ignited younger viewers. Those are goals we can work toward in the next 10 years … Fox News has not accomplished all that I expected. But it’s accomplished a lot more than anybody else expected, certainly a lot more than our competitors expected.”

The accomplishments go much further than ratings points or cable subscriptions. Fox News, for better or (as its legions of critics insist) for worse, has remade the face of television journalism. Its brash delivery and breezy informality, its frenetic pace and dazzling graphics, its mixture of news and opinion shows, its sometimes tabloidish news sensibilities, its marriage of talk-radio with TV news – they reverberate through every newscast on television, broadcast and cable alike.

When you watch Katie Couric introduce the new Free Speech segment on her CBS newscast or leave the anchor desk to roam her set, when you listen to Nancy Grace bully a guest on CNN Headline News or Keith Olbermann launch a political rant on MSNBC, when you see any of the ubiquitous news tickers that crawl across the bottom of the screen of every cable news channel, you’re seeing tangible evidence of the .45 caliber impact of Fox News on television journalism.

“When Fox News first came on the air, it was dramatically different than anything we’d ever seen,” says Terry Anzur, a former NBC correspondent who’s writing a book about television news. “They had a busier screen with more stuff going on – things scrolling, stuff plastered in the corner, graphics exploding. They had flashier personalities, more controversy, a more aggressive style – they really ratcheted up the competition …

“It’s all sort of embodied by Larry King. His CNN show is a forum for softball interviews. If King was the gold standard for a cable TV personality before Fox came along, that has sure changed. Fox had Bill O’Reilly, Fox had Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. I think you could argue that they made emotive CNN anchor Anderson Cooper possible. CNN was the place where the news was the star. They weren’t going to have any personalities. Now everybody has personalities.”

Even more profoundly, Fox News has both ignited and fueled an increasingly vitriolic national debate over the way political ideology influences (or doesn’t) news coverage. Whether you view the network’s slogan “fair and balanced” as an admirable mission statement or self-satirical buffoonery, it is entrenched at the center of an American culture war that, before Fox News came along, was largely waged underground.

“Whether it’s true or not, millions and millions of committed conservatives believed the other networks were liberal and Democratic-leaning,” says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “You can argue all day long whether they’re right or wrong. But the ratings numbers speak for themselves, and speak very loudly.”

Fox News’ critics speak loudly, too, though they usually add some grudging words of respect for the way Ailes trounces them. “He’s a brilliant guy, in a kind of evil-genius way,” says Mark Feldstein, a former correspondent for ABC and CNN, now a professor of media and politics at George Washington University. “What he’s given us is partisan television, narrow-casting for the political right.”

Steven Rendell, a senior analyst for the left-wing media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, says Fox News has indeed influenced TV journalism: It’s ruined it. “They’ve changed the definition of news, and not in a good way,” says Rendell. “The term Fox News is really a misnomer. Much of its programming, and all of its highly rated shows, have little to do with news. Instead of news, they’ve substituted opinion, political crusades and the latest missing blond.”

Ailes accepts a bit of the criticism – “We’ve probably had a few too many missing blond women,” he acknowledges – but only a bit. And the charges of political bias he rejects out of hand.

“When you press people for examples of that, it almost always comes down to the evening shows like Bill O’Reilly’s,” he says. “Yeah, O’Reilly gives his opinion. That’s what those shows are about. They’re our op-ed page.

“When we started out, the other networks didn’t have those op-ed shows. They didn’t need them. Their news is blended with opinion. We pointed out the need to separate the two. Now it’s a standard form. Everybody’s doing one, imitating us. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s mud-wrestling, sometimes it’s useful. You’ve still got to have an idea, a story, a personality and know how to produce it.”

Even when the criticism falls outside the boundaries of the op-ed shows – for instance, the decision to use Oliver North as a Fox New correspondent during the invasion of Iraq, or to hire the showboating Geraldo Rivera as a reporter – Ailes brushes it off.

“It’s very clear what Ollie North is, a pro-military guy. We’ve been upfront about that,” he says. “We’re not trying to sneak somebody out there. But if you’re embedding reporters with troops, how about a guy who won a Silver Star and has been under fire and knows what is going on? He was out in places nobody else was, in hot landing zones, up by the Syrian border when troops come across. He did some great reporting.”

Likewise with Rivera, who recently left the network to launch a talk show syndicated mainly on Fox broadcast stations.

“Geraldo’s done great journalism and been a controversial figure for years,” says Ailes, making it clear the latter quality is a plus in his view. “I remember Willowbrook (a mental institution where Rivera investigated abuses in the 1970), Geraldo jumping fences to get in. During the war in Afghanistan we sent him to Tora Bora, where they thought Osama bin Laden was hiding out. We sent him with five people, and CNN sent 20 people and got there a day later. If you have a firefight in Colombia, with bodies all over the ground, and you call him up and say, “Hey Geraldo, it’s Sunday afternoon, what are you doing?’ he’ll jump on a plane and go. That’s the kind of guy I like.”