Ok, so get ready for a really messed up backstory on the whole Fox News/CBC/Presidential politics angle. Ben Smith at the Politico reminded me this sordid episode, and it's a nice microcosm of horrible insider corporate Democratic politics. Here's the story.
At first, according to the New York Times, News Corp just tried threatening Nielsen.
What happened at the meeting is in dispute. Ms. Whiting met with Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, and Lachlan Murdoch, who is the son of Rupert Murdoch and chief executive of the Fox stations group. Ms. Whiting said she was told that ''if you go ahead, we will do everything possible to discredit you and the company in Washington and legally, and we will start a competitor.''''I have never been threatened like that before,'' she said. ''So we knew it was serious.''
The integrity of ratings system is important for the health of the advertising market, so of course News Corp threatened to undermine it by creating their own ratings service which would apparently have ratings more favorable to Fox. So apparently one of News Corp's specialties is polluting neutral and credible information systems with their own bad version based on bullshit that makes them more money. They also use their unethical political tactics against business partners, which is rare in the business world. I imagine if this happened in the news business they might have had a press release ready to go about Nielsen's 'fringe left-wing' bias.
Anyway, after these threats failed, News Corp began applying political pressure. First, it hired well-connected Clintonistas.
That meeting led to the involvement of the Clinton camp. The News Corporation turned to the Glover Park Group, a media consulting firm whose partners include Joe Lockhart, who was a press secretary under President Bill Clinton; Michael Feldman, who was a senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore; and Howard Wolfson, who was Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief spokesman during her United States Senate campaign in 2000. The introduction was made by Gary Ginsberg, a former adviser to President Clinton who is now the News Corporation's executive vice president, according to people involved in the discussions.Glover Park, in turn, hired former Clinton operatives on the West Coast to handle the anti-Nielsen campaign there, chiefly Mark D. Fabiani, a former Clinton White House special counsel who worked on the Whitewater inquiry; and Christopher S. Lehane, who was also a counsel in the Clinton White House. Both men also went on to work for Mr. Gore's presidential campaign in 2000.
The Glover Park Group has been at the center of some of the biggest policy debates in New York City in recent years. Partners from the firm have been involved in helping organize campaigns against two projects favored by Michael R. Bloomberg, the city's Republican mayor: revamping the city charter and building a stadium for the New York Jets on the West Side of Manhattan.
So there we have Howard Wolfsen, current advisor to Hillary Clinton, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, who screwed up the Wes Clark campaign in 2004, Joe Lockhart, and a whole bunch of Bloomberg Democrats working through the Bronx machine. Ugly. That's not all.
Glover Park has helped organize the Don't Count Us Out Coalition, the public face of News Corp.'s advertising and grass-roots blitz designed to bring Nielsen to heel. The coalition describes itself on its Web site as a collection of "minority leaders, community groups, producers, directors, actors and everyday viewers." But it has acknowledged financial support from News Corp.Though Glover Park - founded by former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart - has been consulting for News Corp. for a year, the firm only registered to lobby for the company last month, listing Joel Johnson, a senior adviser to the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), as its lobbyist. The coalition further beefed up its lobbying activity last month by hiring its first executive director, Cynthia Jasso-Rotunno. She's a veteran of the DNC's Hispanic Outreach Project and worked in the Clinton White House.
The coalition has also tapped Minyon Moore, a consultant with the Dewey Square Group, to work as a senior advisor. Moore helped create the anti-Bush group America Coming Together and last summer worked with rap mogul Sean "P. Diddy" Combs on his Vote or Die! Campaign.
So we've got Dewey Square, Vote or Die, Americans Coming Together in there as well, all with people working for Fox News to help them pressure Nielsen to cheat on its rating system.
And then there was this guy.
Another coalition ad that ran this week in The New York Times was signed by a host of minority and civil rights leaders, including the Hispanic Federation, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute and the National Puerto Rican Coalition.The advertisement blasted Nielsen and directed readers to a Web site set up by Grassroots Enterprise, an organization run by former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry.
Yup, that Mike McCurry of the astroturf sight Hands Off the Internet.
The campaign worked, sort of. There were some hitches, such the fact that Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP sided with Nielsen, as did Jesse Jackson. Many members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, did go along.
"Sen. Clinton was proud to join with the NAACP, more than a dozen New York community groups, members of the New York delegation and over 50 lawmakers, to send a letter based on the merits of the issue," her press secretary, Philippe Reines, said yesterday. "She is extremely pleased that Nielsen is acting on those concerns by agreeing to the call to delay the implementation of the new ratings system in New York."I hear that Murdoch-paid Democratic consultants also included The Dewey Square Group's Minyon Moore and Esther Aguilera - who coordinated the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, respectively.
Eventually, News Corp was exposed, and there was a face-saving compromise where Nielsen made some adjustments to their meters.
It's a pretty disgusting and hilariously corrupt episode. Former (and current) Clinton advisors lobbying successfully on behalf of Rupert Murdoch to help his company cheat advertisers, and working through the CBC and CHC to do it.
This is the gross and excessively regulated media world intersecting with 1990s New Democratic politics intersecting with campaign consultants intersecting with a whole lot of Clintonistas getting very very rich intersecting with the CBC and CHC.
There is a way out of this moral mess. First of all, there's no question now that the CBC should cancel this debate. But that's not all. Since Howard Wolfsen of Glover Park works for Hillary Clinton, and since she was part of this morass (not to mention the Murdoch fundraiser), she should do her part and announce she's not going to this debate. The Democratic Party should not be willing to tolerate this kind of nonsense, and it should certainly not do so in service to legitimizing a Republican propaganda outlet. I don't care how much it made Dewey Square and the Glover Park Group.
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