Democrats have been going after the owners of Fox News -- Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp empire -- for its combination of heavy donations to the Republican party and heavily biased news reporting on Fox.? For a long time, NewsCorp denied it exerted any influence over its subsidiary.?
I'm guessing the protests at the most recent annual meeting of NewsCorp's shareholders changed the board's attitude.? And indeed the New York Times report today has this:
After the controversy over those donations, the News Corporation?s board of directors decided to revisit its policies about disclosure, and on April 12 it adopted a policy ?to publicly disclose corporate political contributions annually on News Corporation?s corporate Web site.?
The first such statement will be published by July 15, and later statements will be published each January. A News Corporation spokeswoman declined to comment further.
The decision may have stemmed from shareholders who raised questions about the donations at an annual meeting last October. ?Our concern was not only that shareholders found out not through the standard decision-making process but through media reports, but more importantly that this was shareholder money that was being used ? but it was not being used for a clear rationale for furthering shareholder value,? Laura Shaffer Campos, the director of shareholder activities for the Nathan Cummings Foundation, told The Associated Press.
At the annual meeting, Mr. Murdoch said the donations were ?unusual? and were ?in the interest of our shareholders and the country,? according to the liberal monitoring organization Media Matters, which posted audio clips of his comments. The interest, Mr. Murdoch suggested, was in bringing ?change? to Washington.
The policy statement appears to bring the News Corporation in line with media companies like Time Warner that disclose donations.
Bloggers and journalists of all stripes might want to pay corporate websites frequent visits.? This change in NewsCorp's policy of non-disclosure was found by AP at the end of April.? If we want to know what political contributions are being made by NewsCorp,? we need to remember -- in July -- to check that website.? NewsCorp may be "disclosing," but it's doing so in a whisper and from what one might fairly regard as an undisclosed location.
P.S.? This is another example of why liberal, progressive, and green voters should own, rather than shun, investments even in companies that spill oil, overcharge for communications services, or support the dissemination of false or biased information.? Every year you get a chance to influence a corporation in which you own shares -- albeit not a big chance.? But influence is influence.? The more people who care about this country invest their savings in prosperous but morally questionable companies, the great chance we have to turn those companies around.
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