Mediate’s Colby Hall has a new report today claiming that progressive media watchdog group Media Matters was never "serious" about putting up the funds to run an ad on Fox News about News Corp’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), pointing to the fact that Media Matters refused to edit its ad to meet Fox News’ requests. But in an interview with the Huffington Post, Vice President of Research and Communications for Media Matters for America Ari Rabin-Havt said that those accounts are completely false.
The idea behind the Media Matters ad was to bring viewers’ attention to the political activities of News Corp, which is the Rupert-Murdoch run parent company of Fox News. According to Media Matters, Fox News has devoted just 17 seconds of airtime to the organization’s RGA donation, despite extensive coverage by other outlets. The group attempted to make the ad as straightforward as possible, to make it harder for Fox to reject it. View the original ad here. Fox News, however, took issue with some of the copy of the ad. Here are the changes the network requested, as outlined in an e-mail from the media buyer to Media Matters:
