Republican Wing-nut versus Republican Wing-nut - Fox's Muslim Connection
Although not all opposition to the building of an Islamic community center near the former site of the World Trade Center grows out of anti-Muslim extremism, some of the most fanatical opinions of the project have received sympathetic coverage from Fox News.Fox loves Muslims. Fox hates Muslims. The Right loves Fox. The Right hates Fox. What a wicked web they weave. Anything for money and power one assumes.
As a result, commentators and humorists like Comedy Central's Jon Stewart have been able to have fun with the fact that the second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- the parent company of Fox News -- is a Saudi prince who is known for donating to Islamic causes and has given over $300,000 to a project sponsored by the imam behind the community center.
"Is Fox News a terrorist command center?'" Stewart asked mockingly after outlining the connections.
Many ground zero mosque opponents hate Fox News too.From Fox's point of view, however, the association may be no laughing matter. Dave Neiwert recently reported at Crooks and Liars that when a Fox affiliate sent a reporter out to "ambush" various minor figures connected with the funding of the community center, the name of Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal was conspicuously absent from the story.
Fox might have reason to be sensitive about its Al-Waleed connection. It has already been getting hammered for it over the past five years by some of the same fervent anti-Muslims who are most deeply involved in the uproar over the "Ground Zero Mosque."
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Al-Waleed's investment in News Corp. dates to back to at least 1997, when Time magazine did a lengthy profile on him and noted, "Alwaleed told TIME that he now owns about 5% of News Corp., the global media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch, making him the second largest individual holder, behind Murdoch."
It was not until 2005, however, that he appears to have begun using his influence with Murdoch in an attempt to counter the increasingly anti-Muslim tone of much American news coverage.
On December 5, 2005, Middle East Online published an article citing remarks made by Al-Waleed during a panel discussion at a conference in Dubai. In the course of discussing prospects for a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs, he had complained that the US media were "in general ... pro-Israel" and suggested that Arabs needed to be more proactive in countering that slant.
He said that during last month's street protests in France, the US television network Fox -- owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in which Al-Walid himself has shares -- ran a banner saying: "Muslim riots."
"I picked up the phone and called Murdoch... (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty," he said.
"Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."
The next day, Robert Spencer -- the conservative blogger who, in partnership with Pamela Geller, launched the "Stop the 911 Mosque!" offensive last spring -- quoted Al-Waleed's remarks at his Jihad Watch website under the heading, "Saudi Prince to Murdoch: jump. Murdoch to Prince: How high?"
Al-Waleed's boast was not the only example of a possible pro-Arab bias by Fox News around that time. In February 2006, the News Hounds website noted that Fox News hosts and analysts had been devoting a great deal of air time to promoting the controversial United Arab Emirates port deal and suggested that it could be because Al-Waleed appeared to have a financial interest in seeing the deal go through.
It was Al-Waleed's own remarks, however, that rankled the most and have been remembered the longest. In December 2008, Spencer accused Fox of being "in the tank" after it ran a series of articles about Israel "deadly Gaza airstrikes" without mentioning Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel -- and he reprinted the December 2005 item on Al-Waleed to prove his point.
Spencer is not the only one. Last February, Think Progress ran an item titled "Conservative Activists Rebel Against Fox News: Saudi Ownership Is 'Really Dangerous For America,'" which noted that Joseph Farah, the publisher of WorldNetDaily, had cited the same 2005 incident when he blasted Fox in a speech delivered at a conservative conference.
Think Progress spoke on the same occasion with Brigitte Gabriel, who has also been deeply involved in agitating against the "Ground Zero Mosque" She took the opportunity to describe a recent interview of Al-Waleed by Fox's Neil Cavuto as a "darling high school reunion" and to suggest that "Cavuto is interviewing him like a buddy-buddy because he is the boss."
