Veteran journalist and admitted liberal Mickey Kaus, despite his pedigree, is solidly anti-amnesty for illegal aliens.
However, when he tried to take FOX news to task for their implicit support for Obama’s unconstitutional executive action on amnesty, his employer the Daily Caller refused to publish his takedown of FOX.
Kaus was told we don’t “trash FOX” here.
So Kaus quit and published his findings at his own site called kausfiles.com.
Kaus begins with an exerpt from former Obama henchman David Axelrod:
Axelrod’s Wish: On page 424 of his recent memoir, Obama’s former top strategist David Axelrod describes running into Fox chieftain (and immigration amnesty supporter) Rupert Murdoch at a dinner in the fall of 2010:
During the dinner, Murdoch, who was seated beside me, insisted that the president had to move on immigration reform. ….
“But the solution has to be comprehensive,” I said. “We can’t just attack a piece of the immigration problem. And you know, there’s one big thing that you can do to help, and that is to keep your cable network from stoking the nativism that keeps us from solving this.” [Emphasis added]
Murdoch and the FOX news network couldn’t antagonize their viewers with pro-Obama, pro-amnesty coverage so they did the next best thing: they ignored amnesty as an issue.
Fox didn’t editorialize in favor of Obama. It just covered other issues. This is a proven pro-amnesty posture, pioneered in the spring of 2013 when the “Gang of 8″ amnesty bill snuck through the Senate while conservatives were distracted by a seeming trifecta of Obama scandals (IRS/Benghazi/seizing AP reporters’ phone records). Given the unpopularity of amnesty with a large swath of voters, any publicity given to the issue is likely to result in an intimidating blizzard of phone calls to the U.S. Capitol, complete with threats against Republicans who might be primaried from the right, Cantor-style. Corporate pro-amnesty lobbyists need peace and quiet to work their influence on Republicans in the face of this GOP-base opposition.
To illustrate how FOX news used this approach in the recent fight over defunding Obama’s executive actions on amnesty, Kaus counted the lead stories on FOX News’s popular Kelly Files program. He considered it an accurate representation of FOX News’ editorial judgment.
For this entire period, Kelly File was basically ISIS and Terror, with a few off-lead excursions into the DHS funding fight, usually when absolutely necessary (as when a federal judge blocked Obama’s executive action). Even some discussions of the federal court decision failed to mention the parallel Congressional funding fight. In fact, immigration was discussed as the underlying issue in the funding fight only 6 times over the whole 34 show period — and only 3 times in the crucial 20 show period that followed the Senate Dems’ initial filibuster of the Republican DHS proposal.
Kaus then points out how FOX News’ relentless focus on ISIS actually helped Obama during this crucial time:
The semi-hysterical focus on ISIS in itself played into Obama’s hands, of course, since the Democrats’ were making a ‘how-can-you-shut-down-Homeland-Security-with-all-this-horrible-terror’ argument. Technically, Democrats were the ones blocking a Homeland Security funding bill with a filibuster– but FOX was not about to emphasize that. “Filibuster” was mentioned only 2 times on Kelly File during this whole 48-day period (three if you count Senator Lee’s attack on “obstruction”). It was mentioned only 17 times on the entire Fox News Channel (plus nine uses of the word in relation to other issues, such as Keystone or Iran sanctions, or general chat show pundit-to-pundit admonitions to stop “filibustering”).
Immigration patriots cannot rely on any media source to get the word out on the catastrophic impact Obama and his pro-amnesty, Open Borders policies are having. It’s up to the grassroots to pass the word to the millions of Americans who are totally unaware of Obama’s schemes because the news media simply choose to ignore it.
