For seven years Fox News has pushed back against the daily scrutiny and criticism leveled at it by Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group. But after David Brock, the group’s founder, said in March that his group’s new strategy amounted to a “war on Fox,” Fox ratcheted up its response.
In the past ten days, the news channel has run more than 30 segments calling for the nonprofit group to be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Its Fox Nation website has even provided a link to pre-completed complaint forms against Media Matters to send to the Internal Revenue Service.
While Fox News personalities like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have long grumbled about Media Matters, this attack on the group has been carried out across the channel’s news and opinion programs. It has included shows like “The O’Reilly Factor,” news coverage of the complaints to the IRS, and even a psychological profile of Brock, a former conservative journalist who went over to the liberal side, on “Fox and Friends” that suggested he might be “full of self-hatred” because he was adopted.
“Media Matters is not a media investigative organization,” said Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer on a “Special Report with Bret Baier” last week. “It’s a war on Fox. And you’re allowed to do that in a democracy. You can be as nasty as you want. The only thing is, don’t ask for a government subsidy.”
To get tax-free status, educational nonprofits have to support their claims with facts and stay out of directly engaging in politics – though they can be as ideological as they like. Fox argues that Media Matters has veered from that educational mission and should be stripped of its special status.
Its argument was first laid out in a June 22 column in the Washington Times by C. Boyden Gray, George H. W. Bush’s White House counsel, who cited two actions by Media Matters: its “unsupported” claims about Fox News being the voice of the Republican Party; and a “sophisticated Democratic-leaning media training boot camp” sponsored by the group that, in essence, Gray said, provided support to the Democratic Party.
“The declaration of war itself is a rhetorical device,” said Gray, a former Fox News consultant. “But when you go further and make allegations that are not substantiated, then it slips into ‘Wow, this looks like it’s for and in support of the Democratic party…It’s absurd to say that Fox is the Republican Party. There’s no factual basis for that.”
Ari Rabin-Havt, the executive vice president of Media Matters, denies both allegations, pointing to the organization’s research on how Fox News, its employees and its parent companies “engaged in an unprecedented campaign in support of the Republican Party” during the 2010 election cycle.
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2 Responses
Just 2 points:
In the fourth paragraph, quoting Charles Krauthamer, Fox says: “’It’s a war on Fox. And you’re allowed to do that in a democracy. You can be as nasty as you want. The only thing is, don’t ask for a government subsidy.’”
I agree that a tax exemption is a government subsidy, even though the government does not write a check to a tax-exempt organization. But in the current debate over deficit reduction, Republicans have consistently insisted that tax deductions are not subsidies, which is inconsistent with Mr. Krauthamer’s characterization that tax exemptions are government subsidies. But, of course, Fox is a subsidiary of the Republican party (or is it the opposite), and so I would expect them to accept this cognitive dissonance.
Second point: Maybe Bill O’Reilly is full of self-hatred because his birth parents could not give him away.
Something seemed strange re: the headline, and the way the story is written, considering the link of “Fox News.” Sure enough, the story is from Politico.com, not Fox News.