How YOU Finance Fox!

It’s bad enough that part of the revenue most of us pay to our cable or satellite companies gets turned over to Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes to fund the Republican Ministry of Propaganda, aka Fox, or my favorite Faux Noise.  However, to my great chagrin, I have learned that is not the only way you and I help finance this obscene pollution of America’s airwaves.

A few weeks ago video pimp and propagandist, James O’Keefe, released heavily edited and deliberately deceptive video that purported to expose an institutional bias at National Public Radio. It was quickly debunked and denounced as a fraud by analysts across the political spectrum, including those at Glenn Beck’s web site, The Blaze.

Nevertheless, partisans in Congress and agenda-driven conservatives in the press continue to behave as if the video were legitimate. The House of Representatives, on a party-line vote, passed a resolution to defund NPR — a purely symbolic gesture as the Senate is not likely to concur…

…However, if the right wants to introduce the issue of federal funding of the media into the public debate, they should be prepared to see their own Fox gored. Fox News has been the beneficiary of government largess for years and it is time stop it and make Fox pay its own way. As far back as 1999, there have been reports documenting how News Corp, Fox’s parent company, exploited loopholes in tax laws that permitted them to avoid levies that all other citizens have to pay. From The Economist:

“…News Corporation and its subsidiaries paid only A$325m ($238m) in corporate taxes worldwide. In the same period, its consolidated pre-tax profits were A$5.4 billion. So News Corporation has paid an effective tax rate of only around 6%. By comparison, Disney, one of the world’s other media empires, paid 31%. Basic corporate-tax rates in Australia, America and Britain, the three main countries in which News Corporation operates, are 36%, 35% and 30% respectively.”

The article goes on to describe how News Corp used a complex network of accounting dodges including as many as 60 shell companies that were incorporated in such tax havens as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Netherlands Antilles and the British Virgin Islands. More recently, an investigation by the New York Times revealed that…

“By taking advantage of a provision in the law that allows expanding companies like Mr. Murdoch’s to defer taxes to future years, the News Corporation paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed. During that time, Securities and Exchange Commission records show, the News Corporation’s domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion.”

[emphasis original]

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The tax loopholes Murdoch uses to stick YOU with his share of the tax bill need to be closed, especially since Fox is not the only corporate criminal growing fat off of them.  At the moment there is nothing we can do, because Republicans control the House, and Fox is their very favorite corporate criminal.  That’s another reason why every Republican in office is one Republican too many.