Wednesday's wacky edition of the Stephanie Miller show spread the noxious idea that somehow the Chamber of Commerce was comparable to "terror companies" -- or that's what Fox News would call them, because they're apparently well-known smear artists. The charge came from leftist columnist and Media Matters staffer Karl Frisch, as Miller begged him to share his latest column full of liberal blather following up on the panic caused by the Think Progress blog:
If Fox News were covering this story -- but let’s face it, they’re not going to cause they gave a million dollars to the Chamber of Commerce -- we’d be calling these terror companies. We’d be talking about you know how awful it is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has an office in New York City just 3.5 miles from Ground Zero. You know, we wouldn’t hear the end of it. But because it is the Chamber of Commerce and because Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, put a million bucks into it. You don’t hear much about it. You certainly don’t hear what you should be hearing about it. They’ll host executives from the Chamber to defend the Chamber with softball questions, but no real journalism going on there.
Would this figment of Fox News really call someone a "terror company" if it had business interests in Egypt or Saudi Arabia? Was Frisch just getting angrier on the radio and saying wackier things that he would say in calmer company? Nope. He's basically re-reading his column on the air:
Imagine for a moment if a group like the right-wing reviled though now defunct community group ACORN had been caught receiving money from Middle Eastern corporations in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Fox News would run the story day and night while tea party heads the nation over exploded. Heck, if Fox News actually covered this story like it has others, it wouldn’t even be calling these businesses “foreign corporations,” instead they would be called “terror companies” and we would be seeing segments asking why the Chamber has an office just 3.5 miles from ground zero. How insensitive.
The Chamber was not timid in responding to Think Progress, asserting in a statement that "The entire storyline is fallacious and indicates the sad state of journalism. Today, 'Think Progress,' or anyone else with an axe to grind, can create stories out of whole cloth that are then legitimized by the traditional media."
