NPR media reporter David Folkenflik filed yet another of his anti-Fox News Channel pieces for Wednesday's Morning Edition. The headline? "A former Fox executive now argues Murdoch is unfit to own TV stations."
But it only lasted 3 minutes and 39 seconds on air. It was over 1,700 words long on NPR.org. This means Folkenflik has filed 44 anti-Fox News stories so far in 2023.
Folkenflik flacked for a leftist campaign to inflict damage on Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Channel by petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to deny a license renewal to the Fox-owned affiliate in Philadelphia, WTXF (Channel 29). The star of his piece was Preston Padden, a former top lobbyist for Murdoch before he moved to Disney.
The NPR media reporter admitted the tactic here was a little bizarre: "Fox News is a cable channel. Cable news is not regulated by the FCC, and Fox's attorneys say what happens on Fox News has nothing to do with its Philadelphia station. As Murdoch's top lobbyist, Padden once would have made such arguments himself."
That's because they make sense. Folkenflik added online that former FCC chair Michael Powell noted license renewal rejections are incredibly rare.
This is just war by other means. Padden told NPR: "I could see the tremendous damage that, in my opinion, Fox News Channel was doing to the country. I could see it in the news. I could see it in friends and family who watched Fox News. And I thought, 'you helped establish Rupert as a force in American television. You, Preston, have a responsibility to do something.'"
And there was this Padden quote: "I was torn between my admiration and affection for Rupert on the one hand and the damage that, in my opinion, the Fox News Channel was doing to America." Padden said Rupert personally advocated masking and vaccines for COVID, but Fox News did not. Rupert forwarded Padden's suggestion that Fox News primetime hosts announce on January 5 that Biden had won. Fox News rejected that idea.
Fox's enemies here are not described as leftist, as usual. The petition at issue comes from "the public interest group Media and Democracy Project [MAD]," and is backed by "the longtime broadcast policy analyst" Gigi Sohn, who was so radical she failed as a Biden nominee for the FCC. Folkenflik added: "Padden filed his own informal letter of objection, as did a former PBS chief, Ervin Duggan, and William Kristol, the founding editor of the Weekly Standard magazine under Murdoch's ownership." Duggan was an LBJ Democrat, and Kristol has done the same 180 as Padden after being a longtime Fox News pundit.
The MAD folks argued "senior management of Fox Corporation (FOX) manipulated its audience by knowingly broadcasting false news about the 2020 election. Its intentional and chronic news distortion further divided the country, sowing discord that was a contributing factor to the attack on our nation's Capitol on January 6, 2021."
Sohn told NPR "It doesn't matter that it was Fox News, and not [Fox television] that knowingly lied to the public about the 2020 election results...They have the same ownership, and it's that ownership that lacks the requisite character to be a broadcast licensee."
We should always underscore that David Folkenflik would never put someone from NewsBusters on who would talk about "the tremendous damage NPR is doing to America." There is no Fairness Doctrine that would force that on NPR.
