Posted on 06/19/2003 3:57:40 PM PDT by TLBSHOW
Al Gore's Secret Admirer: Rupert Murdoch
The press is buzzing over the news that former Vice President Al Gore wants to start up a Democrat alternative to Fox News Channel, apparently to combat the impact of notorious Fox right-wingers such as Geraldo Rivera, Alan Colmes and Greta Van Susteren.
Fox's ample liberal balance notwithstanding, there's another detail about the network that Gore doesn't much like to discuss: his friendship and political alliance with the man Democrats regard as the Darth Vader of the Republican right, Rupert Murdoch.
Gore actually had the nerve to complain earlier this year about conservative news outlets that are "financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media" and put Murdoch's cable news network at the top of his list.
The ex-veep never mentioned, of course, that he was only too happy to accept Murdoch's support during his 2000 presidential campaign.
In September 2000, for instance, the Aussie-American press baron served as vice finance chairman for a big-bucks Gore fund-raiser in New York City - and even contributed $50,000 to Gore's presidential bid.
"Rupert Murdoch, the global media mogul, has been a longtime darling of political conservatives on practically every continent," reported Newsweek.com at the time. "These days, though, Murdoch is backing a candidate of a different sort: Democratic nominee Al Gore."
Newsweek continued:
"Perhaps hedging his bets post-November, Murdoch served as 'vice chair' for the Vice President's Sept. 14 fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall and contributed $50,000 himself. Moreover, Newsweek has learned, Murdoch had a secret meeting with Gore last spring, at which they apparently discovered common ground on several unspecified issues."
And that's not all.
Murdoch's support for Gore included lending a helping hand a month before, in a move that reportedly amounted to a multimillion-dollar in-kind contribution to the veep's Democrat party.
The 2000 Democrat convention was held in Los Angeles in part because owners of the Staples Convention Center agreed to allow the party to use the facility at no charge. As a co-owner of the arena, Murdoch had to sign off on that deal, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, saved Gore and his party up to $10 million.
Gore's brief 2001 stint as visiting lecturer at Columbia University's journalism school offers further evidence of the warm relationship between the failed presidential candidate and the "ultra-conservative billionaire." While at Columbia, the ex-veep chose a select handful of guest speakers to address his class - Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, TV host David Letterman and - you guessed it - Rupert Murdoch.
Gore has also apparently forgotten that, without Murdoch's Fox News Channel, George W. Bush likely would have won the 2000 race in a walk.
It was FNC's Carl Cameron who took an ancient police report documenting Bush's 1976 DUI encounter with Maine cops and turned it into a national scandal just four days before the election.
Gore should be especially grateful to Fox because the network decided to spotlight the story even after reporters for the Associated Press and other news outlets had taken a pass on the information.
It turned out that Cameron's news judgment was right - the DUI story was huge. It rocked the Bush campaign as well as the voting public, 25 percent of whom said in exit polls that the story factored into their voting decision.
With 2000's presidential race as close as it was, there's no question that FNC's decision to run with the DUI story robbed Bush of a clean victory and probably single-handedly turned Gore into the supposed winner of the popular vote (if you don't count all those "votes" from dead people, illegal aliens and the other usual examples of Democrat vote fraud).
When it comes to Fox News Channel, Al Gore has little to complain about. In fact, the ex-veep and the Democrats who supported him should be thanking Murdoch and Fox for giving Gore a shot at the White House that he otherwise never would have had
| Name: | James Gandolfini |
| Sex: | M |
| Nationality: | American |
| Date: | September 18, 1961 |
| Birth Place: | Westwood, New Jersey, USA |
| Occupation: | actor |
| Education: | Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey |
| The Actors Studio in New York, New York | |
| Husband/Wife: | Marcella Wudarski (married in March 1999; filed for divorce in March 2002; divorced on December 18, 2002) |
| Sister: | Johanna (prominent official with New Jersey family court system) |
| Son: | Michael Gandolfini |
| Claim to fame: | as Antony 'Tony' Soprano Sr. in TV series The Sopranos (1999) |
The press is buzzing over the news that former Vice President Al Gore wants to start up a Democrat alternative to Fox News Channel, apparently to combat the impact of notorious Fox right-wingers such as Geraldo Rivera, Alan Colmes and Greta Van Susteren.Now WHAT is wrong with THAT picture?
BAD BAD BAD research.......or simply Terry McCaulife type logic! In other words.....NO logic at all...just agenda-driven spin.
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