January 28, 2012

January 26, 2012

Fox News Drifting Leftward?

Cliff Kincaid at America's Survival has launched a call for Fox News to bring back Glenn Beck.

This announcement comes on the heels of troubling revelations about Beck's firing and other disturbing trends at Fox. It quickly got front-page coverage at the Huffington Post, presumably to launch a campaign of ridicule and smears before Kincaid's idea builds momentum. No matter how much they sneer, the left is terrified of Beck.

Beck's firing was the work of George Soros, Kincaid has revealed. Soros funded Color of Change, the organization founded by Van Jones that launched a boycott against Fox after Beck (really Trevor Loudon) outed Jones as a communist. But Soros is also behind the groups Jewish Funds for Justice and Media Matters, both of which attacked Beck as an anti-Semite for his reporting about Soros' activities during WWII. Soros admitted in a 1998 CBS 60 Minutes interview that as a teenager in Hungary, he had participated in the confiscation of Jewish properties but felt no guilt about it.

Beck's demise apparently came some time after an article, published by Jewish Funds for Justice President Simon Greer, criticized Beck for his exposé on Soros. It was followed by a letter signed by hundreds of rabbis that was published in the Wall Street Journal demanding that Fox sanction Beck. Writing in the Jerusalem Post about Beck's departure, Caroline Glick blamed "the liberal American Jewish establishment," who, she said:

... rejected [Beck's] 'outspoken attacks on George Soros,' the 'extremist leftist anti-American and anti-Zionist global financier who has given more than $100 million to radical leftist groups.'

Fox now appears to be working with Soros. The network recently hired the radical-left, openly lesbian Sally Kohn, formerly of the Soros-funded Center for Community Change. The Center for Community Change received $5.8 million from Soros' Open Society Institute between 2004 and 2010. Its former Board Chair is Cecilia Munoz, now President Obama's White House director for intergovernmental affairs. Munoz is also a former National Council of La Raza vice president and former board member of the illegal immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland. She has been pushing housing grants to illegals in her White House position.

Sally Kohn has been a frequent guest on leftwing MSNBC host Ed Shultz's Ed Show. She is now a regular "Fox News Contributor." Her worldview is evident in an insufferably smug video where she explains her version of left and "right." You guessed it: we're all Nazis. She, on the other hand, is a "moderate." Sure. Now Fox will actually be paying someone to promote such stuff.

Yet despite Fox's compromises, or perhaps because of them, Soros is continuing his attacks. Geraldo Rivera recently reported that a former ABC colleague, Lowell Bergman, now a professor at Berkeley, is heading up a Soros-funded operation to dig up dirt on Fox. The radical-left ProPublica, which receives funding from Soros and Soros allies Herb and Marion Sandler and Peter Lewis, has teamed up with the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to dig up dirt on News Corp. properties, including Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.

In his call for Beck's return, Kincaid said:

Fox should stand up to Soros, not buckle under to his financial pressure. Fox News has been disintegrating since Soros-funded groups forced Glenn Beck off the air. His show was replaced by a program featuring Democratic Party hack Bob Beckel, who regularly insults conservatives.

It's time for Glenn Beck, now on Internet TV, to return to the cable channel so that he can continue his investigative journalism into the rapidly expanding influence of the Soros network of organizations. We urge Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to negotiate Beck's return at the earliest possible date.

Since its inception, Fox News has provided a much-needed change from the uniformly extreme-left bias of other cable and network TV news. Fox sticks out like a sore thumb in the overwhelmingly liberal media spectrum. But the modest voice conservatives enjoy on the nation's only non-radical-left news channel is vulnerable to political pressure. The corporate parent News Corporation is under immense pressure in the United Kingdom over the cell phone-hacking scandal involving its now-closed News of the World tabloid. The founder is aging, the presumptive heir is reportedly liberal, and none of the other cable news channels has moved to compete with FNC for the center-right majority.

The already unfavorable media environment for conservatives may look like the good old days all too soon.

Jim Simpson is a businessman, consultant, and freelance writer. He publishes at American Thinker, Accuracy in Media, Big Government, Big Peace, Washington Times, WorldNetDaily, and others. His regular column is DC Independent Examiner.