At Least 30 GOP-Fox Channel Propagandists Contributed to, Endorsed or Raised Money for Republican Campaigns This Year

Jon Ponder

As you doubtless know by now, Keith Olbermann is returning to work tonight on MSNBC’s “Countdown” after being suspended for making three political donations to Democratic candidates in the last week or so of the midterm election campaign.

“There are multiple people being paid by Fox News to essentially run for office as Republican candidates. If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you’re looking at a significant portion of the entire Republican lineup of potential contenders for 2012.”
– Rachel Maddow

As his colleague Rachel Maddow said Friday night, Olbermann’s suspension — like CNN’s firing Rick Sanchez and NPR’s firing Juan Williams — draws a sharp distinction between the ethical boundaries of real journalistic organizations like MSBNC, CNN and NPR and the lack of any similar journalistic ethics at the GOP-Fox propaganda channel:

MADDOW: Here’s the larger point, though, that’s going mysteriously missing from the right-wing cackling and old media cluck-cluck-clucking: I know everyone likes to say, “Oh, cable news, it’s all the same. Fox and MSNBC — mirror images of each other. But if you look at the long history of Fox hosts not just giving money to candidates, but actively endorsing campaigns and raising millions of dollars for politicians and political parties — whether it’s Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or Mike Huckabee — and you’ll see that we can lay that old false equivalency to rest forever. There are multiple people being paid by Fox News to essentially run for office as Republican candidates. If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you’re looking at a significant portion of the entire Republican lineup of potential contenders for 2012.

They can do that because there’s no rule against that at Fox. Their network is run as a political operation. Ours isn’t. Yeah, Keith’s a liberal, and so am I. But we’re not a political operation — Fox is. We’re a news operation. The rules around here are part of how you know that.

Indisputable evidence of this is the fact that at least 30 people who work for Fox donated money and/or time and/or endorsed Republican candidates in the midterms. According to Media Matters, if Fox was a legitimate news organization, it would have to suspend most of its marquee names, including Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol and even the propaganda channel’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Here’s the list from Media Matters:

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