New York
IN NEW YORK THIS WEEK, you can’t just say, “I’m going to the anti-Fox rally.” You have to specify which anti-Fox rally, because there are plenty of them. On Tuesday afternoon, for example, there was large anti-Fox rally outside of News Corporation’s midtown headquarters organized by the plucky women of Code Pink.
The Code Pink gals dubbed their event the “Fox News Shut-Up-A-Thon,” and, appropriately, the few hundred protestor gathered frequently chanted, “Shut up, Fox,” according to reports. The crowd was unruly and there were small clashes with police. When News Corps employees came out of the building, the protestors raised their middle fingers to them. Such is discourse with the left. What, exactly, were they protesting? Fox’s bias, of course.
For an excellent example of the sort of bias that drives the left crazy, witness this description of the way Fox News reporter Jane Roh comported herself while covering the protest. According to the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Campaign Desk,
Shocking, isn’t it? The story Roh filed for FoxNews.com was even more shocking, and worth reproducing in its entirety:
Cops clad in riot gear worked to keep the demonstrators from blocking traffic or entering FNC’s headquarters near Rockefeller Center, but navigating the crowd that filled the sidewalk and a barricaded strip of street was tricky.
Among those present were members of United for Peace and Justice, an umbrella organization for hundreds of anti-Iraq war groups that also helmed Sunday’s march in New York City. Code Pink, a group comprised mostly of women, also sponsored the rally.
The animal-rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals even sent as its representative a walking root vegetable named Chris P. Carrot. Mr. Carrot’s campaign manager assured FoxNews.com that he was there only to encourage the protesters to stop eating meat.
Other humorous costumes were on hand, but the event was no candlelight vigil. Demonstrators displayed a fondness for graphic wordplay on the company’s name and for shooting their middle fingers in the air.
The protesters screamed in unison “Fox News lies” and held up signs that read “The more you watch the less you know.” A Fox News spokeswoman responded: “This country is built on free speech–they’re entitled to protest.”
Dubbed the “Shut-Up-A-Thon,” the protest was an homage of sorts to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who has been accused of being quick to tell guests to “shut up.”
Glick said he considers Fox News “an annex of the Republican Party,” but he conceded that the disrespect he perceived as a guest on “The O’Reilly Factor” was far from widespread on the network.
He also said that his complaints about Fox News applied to other TV news networks.
“Corporate media has to be overhauled and decentralized and made accountable to local communities,” Glick said, before calling FOX News “particularly reprehensible.”
Asked why he and his fellow protesters didn’t take the party up the street to other nearby networks’ headquarters, he laughed, “Sure! I’m all about spreading the love.”
The anti-Fox News protest lasted for about 90 minutes before most of the participants headed downtown toward Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican National Convention.
Insidious, isn’t it?
LAST NIGHT there was a “Fight Fox Party and Democracy Concert” at Irving Plaza, held in conjunction with the Imagine ’04 Festival of Arts & Ideas. The party was co-sponsored by a number of groups, including a left-wing webzine called AlterNet.
AlterNet isn’t just dabbling, either. They’ve launched a formal Fight Fox campaign, the centerpiece of which is a lawsuit to strip Fox of its trademark of the slogan “Fair and Balanced.”
On December 23, 2003, The Independent Media Institute, AlterNet’s parent organization, filed a challenge with the U.S. Trademark Office, claiming that, in the words of one AlterNet press release, “it is misleading, deceptive, and ‘notoriously mis-descriptive.'”
There doesn’t seem to be much legal precedent to back the AlterNet suit, and chances are that it will be thrown out about as quickly as Fox’s 2003 challenge to Al Franken, which was deemed by a judge to be “wholly without merit, both factually and legally.” Don Hazen, AlterNet’s executive editor, is honest about the group’s motivations for taking legal action: “Mainly, because we were angry. Really angry.”
The left grows more and more agitated by Fox with each passing week. Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org, the group which funded Outfoxed, the Robert Greenwald anti-Fox polemic, recently called Fox, “Enemy #1 in the undermining of democracy.”
There’s no word yet on what number Osama bin Laden would given on Boyd’s Enemies list.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
