Fox News Attacked by Rapper, Blackroots & Colbert (Updated)
  • July 24, 2008

Fox News Attacked by Rapper, Blackroots & Colbert (Updated)

Fox News Attacked by Rapper, Blackroots & Colbert (Updated)

Ari Melber
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It might be Fox News’ worst nightmare: liberal bloggers and black hip hop.

The rapper with the #1 album in the country is waging war on Fox News, in a new campaign backed by black activists at ColorOfChange.org, liberal bloggers and even Bill O’Reilly’s alter-ego, Stephen Colbert.2008-07-24-Picture5.png On Wednesday, the rapper Nas led a small rally at NewsCorp’s midtown Manhattan headquarters, in an effort to deliver 600,000 signatures from citizens protesting biased and racist programing by Fox. Fox refused the petitions, so Nas took his campaign to "The Colbert Report" on Wednesday night, where he blasted O’Reilly and performed his new song, "Sly Fox," which skewers the channel. With his trademark staccato delivery, Nas contrasts criticism of violent entertainment to U.S. foreign policy. ("They say I’m all about murder-murder and kill-kill…What about Cheney and Halliburton? The backdoor deals on oil fields.") And the chorus sounds like Democracy Now! meets Dr. Dre:

 

Watch what you watching/Fox keeps feeding us toxins/Stop sleeping, start thinking/ Outside of the box and/unplug from the matrix doctrine/But watch what you say/Big Brother is watching

 

James Rucker, the head of ColorOfChange.org, argued that Fox’s impact extended beyond the presidential campaign — a period when Fox has already apologized for false and derogatory coverage of Obama, from a discredited report about his youth to wild conspiracy theories about, yes, fist bumps. "When Fox talks about lynching the woman who may soon be our First Lady and then refers to this wife and mother as a ‘baby mama,’ they are maligning not only the Obamas, but Black women and Black people across this country," he said in an email statement. The group, working with MoveOn and liberal bloggers, is still recruiting more supporters for its petition (below with video). Fox, which has previously attacked Nas and likened liberal bloggers to the KKK, has been slow to respond. It even declined to comment when asked about the protest by its sister publication, the Wall Street Journal:

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The Fox News Channel has faced criticism that it is biased against Sen. Obama… including one anchor’s suggestion that a fist-bump between Barack and Michelle Obama could be a "terrorist fist-jab"…. Fox News is owned by News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. On Wednesday, a group of protesters from the organizations ColorofChange.org and MoveOn.org, led by the hip hop artist Nas, will deliver a petition with more than 600,000 signatures to Fox, urging the network to "end its pattern of racist attacks." A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment.

 

Update: Fox News’ Dana Klinghoffer has emailed a response to this "FOX News/rapper protest piece." She writes that "Fox News responded immediately with a statement" on the day of the protest, which read: "Fox News believes in all protesters exercising their right to free speech, including Nas who has an album to promote." She also emphasizes that the Journal article quoted above was "written before the protest." (I left Ms. Klinghoffer a voice message today and may update further if she replies.) And that’s not all. Fox officials are not only attacking Nas for selling his album (which already topped the charts), some are likening the anti-racism activists to the KKK. MTV reports that Bill O’Reilly also responded, deriding protesters such as MoveOn as "the new Klan" with "a radical left agenda." He continued:

 

The latest smear from Move On is telling their Kool-Aid-drinking zombie followers that Fox News is smearing Barack Obama and is a racist concern. Of course, that’s a lie. This broadcast and FNC in general have been exceedingly fair to Senator Obama. … But in order to intimidate anyone from criticizing Obama in any way, Move On is playing the race card.

 

Michael Connery posts the Colbert segments here.

 

 

 

 

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Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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Ari Melber Ari Melber is The Nation’s Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine’s blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at [email protected]. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” “The Joy Behar Show,” “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004).  His reporting  has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review.  He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.  


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