In a vacuum, the exchange between Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly and Bernard Goldberg on the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera would have been very legitimate. Their mutual criticism of the sale was factually accurate. The central argument was about the mainstream media’s refusal to cover the sale despite Al Jazeera having an extremely notorious history.
That’s where we run into a problem, part of which we identified in an earlier post.
Rupert Murdoch, the head of the parent company for which O’Reilly works, has done something not at all dissimilar from Gore. The News Corp. founder’s dealings with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal are increasingly troublesome. Murdoch owns stake in a company that has an Al Qaeda financier named Abdullah Omar Naseef on the Advisory Committee. Naseef also happens to be the founder of the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), which was exposed in a major way last summer. In fact, at one point, Naseef served on the Board of the IMMA at the same time that Deputy Chief of Staff for Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin served as an Assistant Editor:
Bill O’Reilly never touched that story, nor did his network. Perhaps it may have had something to do with Murdoch’s relationship with Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, who’s not only the second largest shareholder of News Corp., but is the head of the company that has Naseef on the Advisory Committee. In the video below, note that when Goldberg is making reference to the guy on Al Jazeera who expressed a desire on-air to see Allah kill all the Jews, he was referring to Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.
Qaradawi and Naseef are friends and longtime colleagues from their days as fellow board members on the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS). Yet, Fox News in general, O’Reilly in particular, never honestly covered Michele Bachmann’s concerns about Huma Abedin, nor did they investigate the relationship between Abedin and Naseef at the IMMA, an organization with goals extremely similar to those of Al Jazeera – turning Muslim minority lands into Muslim majority lands.
With that as a backdrop, gauge for yourselves the degree of hypocrisy in the clip below. Gore’s Al Jazeera deal received more attention on Fox in this one exchange than what the entire network gave to the scandal involving Abedin (absent blatantly biased coverage in support of Abedin). As for Naseef, nothing at all. A search of how many times the Fox News website even mentioned Naseef’s name turned up a Big. Fat. Zero.
It’s worth mentioning that Murdoch is more responsible for Fox’s egregious sin of omission when it comes to not reporting on Naseef and other things that Talal obviously wants kept under wraps, than is O’Reilly.
Nonetheless, such omissions are indeed a reflection on O’Reilly.
…and that’s the memo.
Now on to the Talking Points segment with Bernie Goldberg. There’s so much hypocrisy here, you might try it with some ketchup.
Via Andrew Bostom (h/t Diana West)