Is Fox News going soft?
That
is what a number of Tea Party activists are saying, and they are
organizing a boycott to protest the conservative station’s coverage,
especially what they view as the network’s relative silence in
investigating the attacks on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
“Particularly after the election,
Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins,
Colorado, and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election
in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to
modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our
only conservative network.”
The
three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and
is the second time this group of activists has gone Fox-free in an
effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier
this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership.
(A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had
little effect.)
A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
A leader of the boycott, Kathy Amidon, of Nashville, declined an interview, instead directing The Daily Beast to a website, Benghazi-Truth.
The website, a single-page, 23,000-word manifesto complete with
multicolored fonts, supposedly incriminating videos of Fox News’s
complicity in a cover-up, and communist propaganda photographs, is kept
by someone who identifies himself online as “Proe Graphique,” and who
other members of the boycott described as someone who works “in New York
media.”
By way of explanation, the website
reports: “People ask why not all mainstream media? Why just Boycott FOX?
The answer, again, is that FOX needs the Tea Party/conservatives more
than the conservatives need FOX after FOX turned left, basically selling
out the people who made FOX successful in an attempt to earn an extra
buck. FOX is extremely vulnerable to these boycotts while the rest of
the MSM doesn’t need us at all, to speak of.”
Organizers then encourage would-be Fox News viewers to wait until the One America network, which is supposed to launch this summer as an alternative to Fox, goes on the air.
The night of the first boycott, Fox
News host Sean Hannity devoted a segment to the attacks called “Six
Months of Deceit.” Organizers didn’t watch it—since they were boycotting
the network—and said that it was too little, too late, anyway.
“We
have seen FOX suddenly get very loud about Benghazi after the 1st
boycott, but conservatives are conservative because they are
not stupid,” the website reads. “We recognize, easily, loud noise which
is low on substance. In other words, by whining loudly
about Benghazi without the kind of hard-hitting investigative reporting
that brought down Nixon over Watergate, what we are seeing from FOX IMO
is smoke and mirrors; a trick, to fool us into dutifully genuflecting
at their alter [sic] of their arrogant hosts who throw us crumbs with
one hand while insulting us with the other. If we want FOX to get
serious, we’re going to have to keep hitting them hard. And that is just
exactly what we're going to do.”
Amidon and Proe Graphique—who goes by the Twitter handle FrankMDavis, an apparent reference to the leftist poet who conspiracy theorists believe was Obama’s real father—send out dozens of tweets every day to ideological allies, asking them to contact their representatives to join the boycott.
“The more I looked at it, I have come to the conclusion that Fox is not as fair and balanced as I thought. They shade the truth also.”
Going without the conservative movement’s house organ, however, has proven to be no easy task for true believers.
“I
am having withdrawal. I do like Fox News,” said Kevin Avard, a former
state lawmaker in New Hampshire who is participating in the boycott. “I
have been going to CNN, and to Headline News just to get some kind of
fix. I usually probably only watch them once or twice a year.”
Hjerlied
said that “if I want news, I go to Breitbart News and Drudge and I can
find all the news I need, very quickly,” and after the first boycott,
says he may have “kicked the habit” for good.
“I
used to have it on all day long, and I probably watched maybe six hours
last week,” he said. “The more I looked at it, I have come to the
conclusion that Fox is not as fair and balanced as I thought. They shade
the truth also.”
Donnie Farner, 48, works as a
chimney sweep in central Pennsylvania and runs a website, Proud
Conservative, which sells right-leaning memorabilia like “Liberals Are
Friggin Idiots” T-shirts and bumper stickers that read “Ten Out of Ten
Terrorists Recommend Voting Democrat.”
He said staying away from Fox News, and in particular its website, is harder than he realized.
“It
is honestly because Fox is everywhere. If you are on Twitter, you click
on a link, chances are it might go through Mediaite or Drudge, but it
ends up at Fox because Fox originated the story.”
He quickly clicks away, instead relying on Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze to stay informed.
“The more I research into Fox—I saw that they donate more to Democratic candidates than conservative or Republican candidates—I
was like holy cow! Maybe they are just trying to snatch our pockets.
Maybe they are just talking the talk, because it sure doesn’t look like
they are walking the walk.”
Among the
demands the protesters have is that Fox News “be the right-wing CBS
News: to break stories, to break information, and to do what
news organizations have always done with such stories: break
politicians,” that the network have at least one segment on Benghazi every night on two of its prime-time shows;
that Fox similarly devote investigative resources to discovering the
truth of Obama’s birth certificate; and that the network cease striving
to be “fair and balanced.”
“We
need Fox to turn right,” said Hjerlied. “We think this is a cover-up
and Fox is aiding and abetting it. This is the way Hitler started taking
over Germany, by managing and manipulating the news media.”
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