by Conor Friedersdorf
Interesting story:
A coalition of rabbis wants Fox News chief Roger Ailes and conservative host Glenn Beck to cut out all their talk about Nazis and the Holocaust, and it's making its views known in an unusual place. The rabbis have called on Fox News's owner, Rupert Murdoch, to sanction his two famous employees via a full-page ad in Thursday's editions of the Wall Street Journal - one of many other media properties controlled by Murdoch's News Corp.
The ad is signed by the heads of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements as well as Orthodox rabbis. "We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News," says the ad, signed by hundreds of rabbis and placed by the Jewish Funds for Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group. Earlier this month, the group organized a letter-writing campaign asking Murdoch to remove Beck from the air.
It's darkly funny that Murdoch is getting ad money from this petition. It isn't as if you can embarass him of all people into having higher standards, though to be fair, the Wall Street Journal is an exceptional paper that has staffers who are embarassed by some of their new corporate cousins. If Beck were fired I wonder how much of the FNC audience would rebel?
I suspect we'll never know.