Before the election, Fox Business spent five hours campaigning against California Proposition 24, which would have repealed tax breaks for big media companies, without mentioning that its parent company was spending $1.3 million to defeat the proposal. Needless to say, they featured only opponents of the proposition, not any supporters of it.
From the NY Times:
In five consecutive hours of live reports on Tuesday, a Fox Business correspondent, Adam Shapiro, was stationed at Cambridge of California, a small furniture manufacturing facility in Gardena. Mr. Shapiro repeatedly said the proposition could drive businesses — specifically small businesses, not media titans — out of California, and he said “332,000 jobs” were “on the line.”
Tracy Byrnes, the anchor for one of the reports, expressed the opinion that “the proposition was setting up businesses to be destroyed, quite frankly.”
Yet in its expanded coverage of the issue, Fox did not disclose the News Corporation’s donation to a group working to defeat Proposition 24. Nor did Fox report that the small-business man it featured in the news reports was asked to do the interview by the same group, No on 24 — Stop the Jobs Tax.
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The reports on Fox Business did not include any interviews with teachers or other people supporting the proposition.
Is this the kind of news media we want in this country?
PS. Note that Proposition 24 was defeated, 58.5% to 41.5%.
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