On May 16th the Soros-funded Media Matters’ newest venture, DropFox.com, set out to replicate what Media Matters thinks was a successful campaign against Glenn Beck. You see, after finally admitting they’ve been at war with Fox News since their inception, they are seeking to take credit for all of the internal decisions made at Fox News. There’s an apparent institutional amnesia afflicting the executives at the media “watchdog” and their recent failure to get Fox’s Bill Sammons fired has clearly gone down the memory hole. The failure of their alleged “former Fox insider” story hasn’t seemed to prevented them from banging their collective heads against that impenetrable wall called “ratings.”
So while the Senior Fellows and Junior Fellows / interns continue to monitor Fox News 24 hours a day and poorly transcribe the shows and edit clips to manufacture evidence of “misinformation” – if they even bother to do that – Angelo Carusone (@Drop_Fox) gets to waste rich progressives’ money on the other angle: targeting companies who advertise on Fox News – with smears (Via Mediaite.)
The effort by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters to convince half a dozen leading national advertisers to pull their dollars from the Fox News Channel got a high-profile snub Thursday when Orbitz, the travel company, not only declined to participate, but fired back at Media Matters, calling the “Drop Fox” campaign a “smear effort.”
Ouch. Not exactly a great first impression there, Angelo. To add some salt to the wound, Orbitz (and other DropFox targets) aren’t what one would consider “right wingers.” (Via Hollywood Reporter.)
There are six other companies DropFox has set its sights on: Netflix, Best Western, Priceline, Delta Airlines, Ocean Spray and Southwest Airlines. All of them advertise on Fox News, but not in order to make any sort of perceivable political point.In the case of Netflix, in fact, CEO Reed Hastings has been a large donor to Democrats, so he’s presumably on the same political side as Media Matters and its DropFox offshoot. Likewise, the Orbitz Political Action Committee made just two large donations last year, both to Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat.
That’s going to leave a mark.
In the same article, Orbitz didn’t just call DropFox a “smear campaign”, they took it a step further and smacked Media Matters as a whole:
“This is a political organization that has been funded pretty extensively to go after one network, and we aren’t going to engage in that fight,” Orbitz spokesman Brian Hoyt said.He’s right. Media Matters isn’t a media watchdog, it’s a political organization. One that for some reason is tax-exempt as an educational institution but violates that charter on a daily basis.
Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert didn’t take kindly to Orbitz telling his organization to stop whining. He took to Twitter and in a snit, totally misrepresented what the Orbitz spokesman said:
For context, here’s what Orbitz actually said:
“We have a strict policy of tolerance and non-discrimination, and that means we don’t favor one political side over another. Tolerance is a two-way street,” he said. “We’re going to advertise on conservative TV stations, liberal TV stations and — if there are any out there — unbiased news broadcasts.”
Let’s keep Eric’s editorializing in mind next time he claims to be debunking “right wing misinformation.”
Kudos to Orbitz for not buckling to astroturf pressure. Let’s hope the rest of the DropFox targets follow their lead.
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