David Freedlander reports at
The Daily Beast:
Is Fox News going soft?
That
is what a number of Tea Party activists are saying and they are
organizing a boycott to protest the conservative station’s coverage,
especially what they view as the network’s relative silence in
investigating the attacks on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
“Particularly
after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied,
75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He
pointed to
an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election
in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to
modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our
only conservative network.”
The
three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and
is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an
effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier
this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership.
(A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had
little effect.)
A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
A leader of the boycott, Kathy Amidon, of Nashville, declined an interview, instead directing The Daily Beast to a website,
Benghazi-Truth.
The website, a single-page, 23,000-word manifesto complete with
multicolored fonts, supposedly incriminating videos of Fox News’s
complicity in a coverup, and communist propaganda photographs, is kept
by someone who identifies himself online as “Proe Graphique,” and who
other members of boycott described as someone who works “in New York
media...”
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