It’s a time-honored publicity technique: prepare an ad likely to be rejected by media outlets, and when they turn you down, complain to the press that you’re being denied a fair hearing. . .
[T]he ad campaign does something sneaky and misleading. It entirely omits mentioning the three older networks, instead leaving readers with the impression that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News management is the primary obstacle keeping viewers from seeing the ad on air. In fact in a mere 38 words the ad manages to pack in four references to Fox News, three by name and one to the network’s motto (“We report. You decide.”).
Maybe the small space of the blog ad just couldn’t accommodate the extra few characters needed to replace “the ad FOX won’t run” with “the ad the broadcast networks won’t run”. Or maybe the devisers of the ad knew that their cause wouldn’t seem as sympathetic if readers knew that CBS, ABC and NBC agreed with Fox in ruling the spot off bounds. Or maybe they knew a certain portion of readers who instinctively assume the worst of Fox would be more likely to click on the ad at the tingly thought of catching Rupert’s minions misbehaving.
4 thoughts on “Nah, Just The Fox, Ma’am”
Comments are closed.
Hardly seems that big a deal does it? They didn’t lie or misrepresent anything.
Now, Condi saying that there were no credible warnings of Al-Qaeda attacks… that’s a lie for you.
Man, some people are like a broken record.
I knew it! As soon as I saw the blogads, my first thought was, “What are the odds that a few other networks besides Fox also declined to run the ad, but Fox is the only one they’re mentioning?” Pretty good, as it turns out.
Fabula de te narratur. (For the uneducated, that means – Pot’n’kettle.)
It seems one Mr. flyerguy wasn’t at all misled by their claim. No untruth, no misleading: what’s the point of the post?