Fox rejects ad referring to Murdoch’s $1m gift


by Sunny Hundal    
August 26, 2010 at 2:12 pm

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the parent company for Fox News, recently made a $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association, a partisan group planning to help Republican campaigns.

Facing criticism, News Corp. responded by citing their support for the RGA’s “pro-business agenda”.

Progressive media watchdog group Media Matters responded by creating an ad critical of the donation, and requested airtime during The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News to broadcast the spot.

But according to HuffPo – they rejected the ad for spurious reasons.

None of the UK-owned News International media outlets reported on the donation either.


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Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
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From the Huffington Post article linked:

Rabin-Havt told the Huffington Post that they refused to change the message to be from Media Matters, since it’s a message in the words of a News Corp. executive. So as a compromise, the group changed it to, “And now, a special message that Fox News’ primetime hosts refuse to tell you, brought to you by Media Matters,” which is technically correct, since no primetime hosts have mentioned the donation. Media Matters did make the change, noting it was interesting that Fox News is now on record saying News Corp. opposes “Democratic candidates.”

The original advert claimed to be a message from Fox News, to which Newscorp quite reasonably requested that the organisation sponsoring the message identify themselves as so doing. Media Matters response was to ask Fox News to run an advert which starts by implying that Fox News was keeping information from its viewers (as it happens, true, but not a commercially acceptable practice for a news channel I’d have thought). So basically Media Matters were asked to identify the makers of the advert as themselves not Fox News, and responded by using a line that implies the broadcaster they sought to air the advert on was not trustworthy. I can see why that might not be aired.

There was one factual clarification also, which seems fine.

None of this excuses the problem of a major media corporation sponsoring one political point of view, but since Fox claimed to be happy to run the advert with two minor changes, and Media Matters refused to make one change and dickishly used an alternative wording which would guarantee it would not get broadcast, I don’t think we can really see censorship here. The sort of worrying links between media and politics we could do without maybe, but if this was an attempt at censorship Fox are really bad at it.

Just another example of the fake freedom the right claims to support.

And these are the clowns who think we should desroy the BBC, and replace it with corporations like them.

FOX NEWS “You are free do do whatever we say so.”


Reactions: Twitter, blogs
  1. Liberal Conspiracy

    Fox rejects ad referring to Murdoch's $1m donation http://bit.ly/aryuhD

  2. Derek Bryant

    RT @libcon Fox rejects ad referring to Murdoch's $1m donation http://bit.ly/aryuhD

  3. EdH

    RT @libcon: Fox rejects ad referring to Murdoch's $1m donation http://bit.ly/aryuhD

  4. Welsh Ramblings

    Is the USA really a full democracy? RT @libcon Fox rejects ad referring to Murdoch's $1m donation http://bit.ly/aryuhD





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