DIANA WEST: THE FOX EFFECT PART 5
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2488/The-Fox-Effect-Pt-5.aspx
Earlier this year, I wrote a series of posts on “The Fox Effect,” which analyzed Fox coverage of Islamic stories through the Saudi scrim — in other words, keeping in mind the part-ownership (7 percent) of News Corp. by ranking Saudi scion Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the part-ownership (nearly 20 percent) of Rotana (Alwaleed’s media company) by Rupert Murdoch. (More coverage here.) The series culminated with a lengthy Q & A with Ryan Lauro here.
In this week’s syndicated column, I note that Fox — where Steve Emerson first broke the news that Saudi 3B-terrorist and ex-“person of interest” in the Boston bombing, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, was slated for deportation on “national security grounds” — appears to have “dropped” the story. That is too tepid a term. While Glenn Beck appeared on O’Reilly last night to present his team’s ground-breaking work on the MSM-ignored story, Fox hasn’t just dropped the story. The network is censoring it.
A search of the Fox News website reveals zero entries on Alharbi. To date, the Emerson video discussing Alharbi’s scheduled deportation remains available; so does Beck’s O’Reilly video. There are no news stories, however, on the Saudi national who was detained, becoming a “person of interest,” a 3-B terrorism-designee, a “witness,” and then a bone of contention between House members and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. The whole event is non-news.
More aggressively sinister, a report by Todd Starnes, radio host of “Fox News and Commentary” and a regular on “Fox & Friends,” was taken down from the site — even after it was a Drudge selection (i.e., widely publicized), twice!
Dated April 22, the Starnes story broke news. It was headlined: “Saudi National Was on Terror Watch List” — a claim that Janet Napolitano would confirm before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Starnes’ tweet on the topic remains in place.
Starnes’ story also ran at Townhall.com, where he, like I am, is syndicated. The story has vanished completely from his queue there. (The search listing for the Townhall entry, however, still pops up here. (Here is an excellent presentation,with illustrations, of Starnes’ disappearing Saudi-Fox story.)
This is not, however, a Townhall effect; it’s a Fox effect. I know that because my two syndicated columns on Alharbi, complete with that radioactive (to Fox) watchlist detail, are available at Townhall.com here and here.
That leads me to conclude this extremely public and crude hand of censorship belongs to Fox.
Three years ago, I wrote that Fox should register as a foreign agent. How much more evidence of its soft-soaping for “The Kingdom” do we need?
Or: Divest Now.
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