Those who call it “fake news” may wish to reconsider giving Fox News Channel free advertising: FNC and Cablevision have announced a new multi-year carriage agreement, continuing Fox’s presence in homes throughout New York, New Jersey, and my native Connecticut. This news comes despite constant attacks from the Left, primarily in the form of Media Matters, who consistently claims that Fox News is a kind of partisan propaganda outlet that needs to be exposed. Could it be that Media Matters’ and other critics’ constant drumtaps against Fox are helping to make it stronger?
In fact, Fox is still going strong. For nine years straight, the network has been on top of the pile. It’s raking in more and more cash. During its coverage of the Egyptian uprising, Fox beat out MSNBC and CNN combined, the latter of which having had the historical advantage of being the international network. (Many networks risked a great deal to get in on the story, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper, CBS’s Lara Logan, and Fox News’s Greg Palkot were all attacked during their coverage.)
Meanwhile, Media Matters continues its latest anti-Glenn Beck campaign along with Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), the latter of which bought an ad criticizing Beck’s “offensive and inappropriate Nazi rhetoric,” and appropriated other people’s statements (without permission) to pretend there’s a cohesive movement against the network — and also that the outrage over Beck was bipartisan, not merely a group of “left-wing rabbis.”
This never had a chance of being effective, but certainly provided free advertising for Fox. What made it worse was that three of the Jewish organizations being relied on to show bipartisanship publicly repudiated the effort. In fact, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman put it in perspective:
Jen Rubin at the Post notes that Deborah E. Lipstadt, a noted Holocaust scholar who also got shoehorned into the ad, objected, saying:
For the Anti-Fox Brigade, this didn’t matter. From Media Matters:
The question wasn’t sponsorship but consensus. By drafting groups into an ad about Fox, JFSJ shot itself in the foot by giving the Anti-Defamation League a media opportunity to be relatively salutory when it mentions Murdoch, Ailes, etc., as “pro-Israel stalwarts.” The ADL also had the opportunity to slam JFSJ for taking the quote out of context. JFSJ (and its ally Media Matters) just provided Fox with another notch in the belt — a public nod from a large, respected Jewish organization.
That’s not to mention the added bonus of dinging the attackers. You get permission to use quotes in these ads so that the people to whom you’ve just called attention won’t use that attention to slam you publicly. (Has anyone at these groups ever covered an election?)
All that gets back to the original point. After supporting and defending JFSJ for misusing a quote without permission to advance a political agenda, Media Matters claims:
It’s not just the pot and the kettle. By spinning its wheels this way, Media Matters is just shilling for Fox at this point. Maybe they should take a breather.
