He sees the creeks because he's apparently a geography nut. He doesn't just know states and countries and capitals. He knows every creek, every hill, every briar patch, says Neil Cavuto, senior vice president of Fox Business News and host of Your World With Neil Cavuto.
"It borders on obsessive. But it's one of the things that intrigues me about him," Cavuto says.
"He's a smart guy. He knows history very well. He knows economics very well. And he's got that dry British wit. I get a kick out of it."
The British accent doesn't hurt.
"I've always told Stuart he can read the back of a corn flakes box and sound authoritative," he says.
Butting Heads With Ted Turner
Varney's accent wasn't always an asset. He began his journalism career working for a radio station in Hong Kong. When he arrived in America in 1975, he landed in San Francisco and got interviews at the three major news networks, but none would hire him because they said his accent worked against his credibility.
"I got through the door. I got to meet the news directors, and they were all very nice, and they all said the same thing. 'Sorry. The voice. The accent. Can't do it,'" Varney says.
The only station that would hire him was KEMO TV, or Channel 20 on the less desirable UHF dial, where he was the sole anchor of a three-hour live "rip-and-read" television show, which, as it sounds, involved him ripping the news right off the Reuters teletype and reading it. And he had to work for free for three months to prove he could do it.
"Not everybody's willing to work for free for three months and be in the studio at 4:30 in the morning to do cactus television. But I was," he says. "I was an immigrant. Hungry. Fresh off the boat."
By 1980, he was hired by CNN, which was then the first channel to provide 24-hour news coverage. He did an early morning news show there until March 1998, when he left to take a break because he says 18 years of doing an early morning show had wreaked havoc on his family and social life. In January 1999, he was asked to co-anchor Moneyline when Lou Dobbs resigned to head an online site about outer space, so Varney went back to CNN.
But two years later, he left CNN again, he says, because he was unhappy that the network and the content of his show were straying from their middle-of-the-road political coverage and slanting to the left.
Varney's relationship with his boss, Ted Turner, had also soured by that point after they had a dispute during an interview. Varney asked Turner to respond to the fact that his then-wife, Jane Fonda, had announced she'd found Jesus and was becoming a devout Christian. Varney says he can't remember exactly what Turner said, but he wasn't pleased.
"I thought that in good conscience, as a good journalist, I have to give my audience what they want, and they want to know, 'Jane Fonda, devout Christian, married to Ted Turner?' You gotta ask about it," Varney says.