A grim warning was given in Britain from a leading American media campaigner on the dangers this country could face if it changes its rules on television news impartiality to accommodate demands by Rupert Murdoch to create a slanted Fox News channel here.
Less than 24 hours before the tragic assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, left wing bloggers and activists at Britain’s first Netroots conference at the TUC’s headquarters in London were given chilling evidence of the power of Murdoch’s biased Fox News in political debate in the United States.
Ari Rabin-Havt, one of the key campaigners for Media Matters of America, described in graphic detail how Fox fuelled political ignorance and even contributed to violence against liberal campaigners. Cheerleaders of the rabid right include Fox presenters Glenn Beck and former Republican vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
The ignorance of Fox viewers is staggering. Many of them have been convinced that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim and that his modest healthcare plans include setting up death tribunals to decide who can have medical treatment. All this has featured on Fox and was dramatically shown in videos from the controversial TV station.
Ari Rabin-Havt showed his TUC audience extracts from simplistic Fox News broadcasts often fronted by Glenn Beck who conflated communism and Nazism because they use the word “socialist” and then immediately described the US Democrats as socialists. In recent court case, defendants who had opened fire on American Civil Liberties Union staff in California actually cited Beck’s tirades as one of the reasons they were pursuing liberals.
Since the assassination attempt, David Brock, the chief executive of Media Matters, has written to Rupert Murdoch demanding he curb the inflammatory language used by Fox News favourites Beck and Palin.
Brock said: “I cautioned against Glenn Beck’s proclamation that he was a ‘progressive hunter’ and his statement that the government was full of vampires before he instructed his viewers to ‘drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers’.”
He also warned “against Palin revealing her 2010 ‘targets’ with a map showing gun sights over 20 congressional districts, including that of Gabrielle Giffords, urging followers not to retreat, ‘Instead – RELOAD’.
“Even after evidence emerged in October that California gunman Byron Williams was inspired by Beck to attempt to assassinate progressive leaders and I pleaded for Palin to set an example by condemning her Fox colleagues’ violent and revolutionary rhetoric, Fox did nothing to address the situation.”
Ari Rabin-Havt warned that it was not just flagrant bias that damaged the political system. The very fabric of political life could change by the launch of a Fox News channel in Britain.
The Republicans have contracted out much of their political work to Fox News, he said. This includes free advertising slots to promote the creation of the Tea Party when it was set up with the aim of shifting the Republicans to the radical right. There has been financing from Rupert Murdoch for potential Republican presidential candidates. According to Ari Rabin-Havt, Murdoch has spent some $40 million backing five potential Republican candidates with the aim of ousting Obama from the White House in 2012.
Rabin-Havt also said that the Electoral Commission in Britain exempts media organisations from the rules on election funding. In fact, the Commission rules insist that any help in kind as well as cash must be recorded. Presumably this would restrain Murdoch from giving free advertising to the Conservatives on British Fox News – but only during an election campaign.
However, it would not stop him broadcasting a 24-hour channel which consistently favoured right-wing Conservatives or offering huge amounts of free advertising before any campaign began.
In the US, liberals had been slow to react to the creation of Fox News, said Ari Rabin-Havt. The result is they have been playing “catch up” ever since. He warned people in Britain to act now before Murdoch gains complete control of BSkyB.
He also expressed surprise that BBC director-general Mark Thompson was not stridently opposed to the abolition of the impartiality rules for broadcasters.
British campaigners were urged to set up their own equivalent of Media Matters and launch an online fight to prevent Murdoch getting both total control of BSkyB and the go ahead from David Cameron for the scrapping of broadcast impartiality rules.
Rabin-Havt’s analysis of the situation in the US suggests that people have much more to fear than they realise from Murdoch’s increasing dominance of the media. So far most of the insults against the left have been confined to the blogosphere with Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) and Harry Cole (Tory Bear) – leading the charge.
Staines has already described Netroots as “Nutroots” – suggesting that anyone who opposes Conservative cuts must be a member of the loony left. The idea of someone such as Staines joining forces with the likes of Richard Littlejohn on a British Fox News calling for a stake to driven through the hearts of moderate left-wingers ought to give us all pause for thought.
