After Fox News Channel parent News Corp. gave $1M to the Republican Governors Association, the Democratic Governors Association mounted a fund-raising effort to collect what it calls the “Stop Fox Fund.” It says grassroot support has matched the $1M. Meanwhile, Fox is allowing a Media Matters ad on the topic to run, and a study found network employees favored Democrats in 2008.
DGA head Nathan Daschle tweeted out a message over Twitter, saying “Our supporters sent a message to Fox News by raising over $1M for DGA. Thx to all who made this happen.”
Liberal media watchdog Media Matters is running an ad on FNC’s “O’Reilly Factor” taking the network to task for not giving the story of the donation meaningful news coverage, stating that it has not yet been mentioned on the network during prime time. According to Politico, it took three tries to get copy that FNC could accept for the 30-second spot, said to cost $35K. TNC said the first two versions had factual inaccuracies that were addressed in the final version.
The Examiner commissioned the Center for Responsive Politics to do a study of network employee political giving during 2008. It tallied up contributions to candidates and PACs for various employees at ABC, CBS and NBC, and found a very strong tilt toward the Democratic Party. It found 1,160 employees giving a total of more than $1.02M to Democrats, dwarfing the 193 employees who gave almost $143K to Republicans.
Barack Obama received 710 of the contributions, totaling about $462K, compared to just 39 contributions for John McCain, totaling about $27K.
