Fox News analyst defames MoveOn
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Dear Media Corps member,
Through Fox Watch, many of you have helped monitor every single program that has aired on the cable station Fox News Channel for the past month. Those of you participating have filed hundreds and hundreds of reports about distortion, inaccuracies, and bias -- breaches of the basic standards of journalism. Wednesday night, a Fox Watch monitor caught an outright lie during one of Fox News' flagship programs, The O'Reilly Factor. In a discussion of progressive websites, host Bill O'Reilly called TomPaine.com "the most rank propaganda in the world." Fox News analyst Liz Trotta responded: "Well, how many people do you think -- who look at MoveOn.org, know it's affiliated with the World Socialist Movement..." This outrageous and false charge could only have been intended to discredit the work of MoveOn.org Civic Action and its members. It is akin to the tactics of the McCarthy era. Call on Fox News to dismiss Liz Trotta for such an utter lack of journalistic scruples:
Fox News Channel (If you're not a member of the Media Corps, click here to join. As a Media Corps member, you'll receive more alerts like this one in the future.) After Trotta made this claim, O'Reilly sought a response from his other guest, Forbes magazine's Silicon Valley bureau chief Quentin Hardy: HARDY: MoveOn.org Civic Action -- you know, they get -- in November, according to comScore, they got 240,000 hits. Red-baiting of this sort is intended to scare people away from participating in democracy. In addition to being a Fox News analyst, Trotta is the New York bureau chief of the Washington Times, the peculiar D.C. newspaper operated by Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. But no matter who she is, her statements should not be tolerated. Untrue as they are, they are meant to undermine grassroots work that Trotta and Fox News don't like. Will Fox News hold Trotta responsible for her McCarthy-like accusations? Fox should fire Trotta for engaging in partisan deception instead of fair and balanced journalism:
Fox News Channel Remember to keep your comments polite and professional.
Sincerely,
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