Established
by Media Matters for America, NewsCorpWatch (NCW)
is dedicated to “providing
comprehensive and up-to-date information regarding News Corporation” (a.k.a. News Corp),
the parent company of Fox News. This information is invariably of a
negative nature and is designed chiefly to discredit News Corp, its
chairman/CEO Rupert
Murdoch, and the Fox News Channel.
Media
Matters initially announced the rollout of its new NCW project in early May of 2011, with a
full-page International
Herald Tribuneadvertisementcharging
that News
Corp and its various publications habitually promoted all
manner of “hate speech, illegal activity and misinformation.”
In
July 2011, NCW focused its attention heavily on a new international phone-hacking
scandal involving News
of the World,
a British tabloid published by News International, a subsidiary of
News Corp. In previous years, some employees of the tabloid
had been accused of obtaining illicit information about celebrities,
politicians, and members of the British Royal Family by way of phone
hacking and bribery. But now, it was revealed that the
phones of some highly sympathetic figures -- the murdered English schoolgirl Milly
Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, victims of the July 2005 London bombings, and victims of the 9/11 attacks -- may also have been
accessed illegally by News Corp employees. Massive public outrage resulting
from these disclosures sparked advertiser boycotts and ultimately led
to News
of the World's
permanent closure on July 10, 2011, after 168 years of publication.
A
key antecedent of NCW's formation was George Soros's $1
million contribution to Media Matters in October 2010. At the time,
Soros specifically cited
that organization's work against Fox News, of which he has long been a
vocal and unsparing critic, as the chief motivation for his donation: “I
am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the
challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our
democracy.” Two months later, in an interview with CNN newsman Fareed Zakaria, Soros warned
that the combination of Fox News, its then-host Glenn Beck, and the
Tea Party might lead “this open [American] society to be on the verge of some
dictatorial democracy.”
NCW's
campaign against News Corp and Fox News is waged
in tandem with the Soros-funded Center for American Progress
(CAP), which in July 2011 collected some 12,000 signatures on a petition demanding
to know whether News Corp reporters had violated U.S. law by
illegally obtaining the phone records of some 9/11 victims in the United
States, possibly in collaboration with Fox News. Meanwhile the CAP
offshoot, Think Progress, initiated
Twitter and Facebook campaigns calling for investigations into Rupert
Murdoch’s entire U.S. media empire.
