Murdoch punks Australian election

I wrote the other day about how the collapse of Julian Assange's electoral project in Australia seems to have attracted little attention, even among Assange's detractors. Australian stories don't get attention unless they involve crocodiles or missing backpackers. The BBC's former Australian correspondent Nick Bryant has bewailed on that very subject.

Here's another being missed story, the blatant attempt to swing the Australian election by Rupert Murdoch.

According to Neil Chenoweth, a senior writer with The Australian Financial Review, and who is described by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as "the world’s most substantive writer on the public and hidden worlds of the Murdoch business empire", Murdoch's campaign against the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is in large part because the ALP dared to try to regulate, or rather reign in the excesses of, Murdoch's Australian newspapers.

Following the revelations in the UK of systematic law-breaking by Murdoch's papers, which culminated in the Leveson Inquiry and the closure of the News of The World, Australia's government grabbed the opportunity and instituted their own inquiry and devised new media laws. They failed (and the proposed laws didn't even tackle media centralisation in Australia, the worst by far in the Western world).

Murdoch then dispatched his most vicious attack dog, Col Allen, and, says Chenoweth, "what politicians in Britain and the US can draw from this is that leaving Rupert Murdoch with a flesh wound is like writing a suicide note. He is taking names. He will come after you."

Under Col Allan, News Corp Australia has unleashed an extraordinary campaign to denigrate the Labor Prime Minister at every opportunity, while endlessly praising [opposition leader] Tony Abbott.

...

In the face of unrelenting negative coverage from the News Ltd papers the Gillard government came to believe News had crossed the line. It sought to pass media reform which would disadvantage News but failed to get it up. The election campaign was always going to be bloody.

Another Murdoch foe, Tom Watson MP, has flown into the election to support the ALP and specifically to highlight Murdoch's relentless campaign. Murdoch's newspapers' response has been to report Watson as "fat" and ignore his actual criticism and reason for being in the country.

Watson's thesis is that the ALP's National Broadband Network (NBN) is a threat to Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch has cable TV interests and the government plan for super fast national Internet is a threat to NewsCorp in a world where Netflix is now reportedly a third of internet traffic in the US.

Watson said he decided to travel after he saw what the BBC has reported (as a one-off), one Murdoch paper's front page rubbishing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (pictured above, second from top right). Chenoweth points out that this front page is an example of a tactic that Col Allen honed in the bearpit that is politics in the state of New South Wales:

His photographers dogged state and local politicians until they caught them drinking in the wrong place, jaywalking or breaking road rules. As a merry jape he would superimpose politicians’ faces on film characters with outrageous headlines.

Watson's numerous media appearances since he arrived seems to have at least tweaked Murdoch's mates. So there's that.

Watson has pointed out that the Murdoch paper's coverage need only swing a few voters to deliver a right-wing victory in a very tight election. The sustained anti-Labor campaign has been going on since early 2011. Although the ability of Murdoch to swing elections has been questioned many times before, most famously his own newspaper The Sun's claim that they were 'what won it' for the Tories in Britain in 1992, even skeptical media academic Peter Chen points out that media spin/bias does empirically have an effect, though maybe in ways you mightn't think it would and maybe just at the margins.

Chen, like Chenoweth, also sees Murdoch's actions as less, or not just, about NBN and more, or equally, about payback and "the greater ideological alignment between the aging patriarch and Tony Abbott." Murdoch's praise for Abbott on Twitter has been almost cringe-worthy.

Warns Watson:

Politicians should know that they are commodities to Murdoch. He moves them around. They should think again if they think they will enjoy his loyalty forever.

Underlines Chenoweth:

There is a cost to this. First, Murdoch will demand his price . . . every year. It’s what he does.

Second, it looks like Col Allan isn’t going back to New York. He’s hanging around. He has six big papers to play with but only one style of journalism: it’s about brute force. It doesn’t really matter which government is in power. He has no other model. So he’ll be coming for you too.

News Corp Australia, whether overtly or not, will claim that it got Abbott into government. This puts Abbott into an impossible situation.

It undermines the legitimacy of his incoming government. This is not a partisan thing. You may or may not feel Abbott deserves to be PM. But whether you are a Liberal or Labor supporter. it’s absolutely unacceptable for a foreign company to be able to claim that it determined the Australian government.

Or, for that matter, any government.

Murdoch as Mephistopheles

By now you've probably read or heard about James Murdoch's OTT attack on the BBC at the Edinburgh Television Festival.

Murdoch was giving the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, as his father had done twenty years before. Well this reminded me of one of them I have never actually watched - the one Dennis Potter gave in 1993, widely regarded as the greatest ever.

Visibly suffering from cancer though Potter is, it is mesmerisingly brilliant. Vituperative and funny. Sentimental and disturbing (especially to the audience of television big-wigs, some learn forward, some cover their mouths).

In it he tells several tales of Murdoch. Here's one:

At the time Rupert Murdoch was anxiously trying to guild if not renovate his image while lobbying to prevent his cable television company coming under the same rules and regulations that apply to other British television companies, he announced that his main company was going to fund a new Chair at Oxford University to the tune of £3 million. It was to be called - I do beg your pardon, but I cannot keep a straight face – it was to be called the Murdoch Chair in Language Communications. But the announcement came with cack-handed timing on the very same day that the Press Council formally and of course ineffectively censured Murdoch’s Son for calling homosexuals “poofters”. Some language. Some communication.

Murdoch did not turn up for the ceremonial meal to mark the largesse at Oxford, always a place where the gap between the cup and the lip can be measured by more than an inch of the sardonic. But Rupert has a touch of pure cruelty in his make-up. He sent Kelvin MacKenzie, the sharp little weasel that edits that daily stink they call the Sun, and the maladroit fellow had to sit and chew and probably even dribble a bit between two professors.

Transcription



Just before he died of cancer, he sat down with Melvyn Bragg for a final interview. Of course the subject of media mogul Rupert Murdoch came up.

Economic depression: a silver lining

Source

Women are from Venus

Quite astonishing, and in lots of ways refreshing, report from Davos by Arianna Huffington:

My night started with a really special all-women's dinner on top of the Davos mountain, hosted by Wendi Murdoch and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, to raise awareness, pledges, and support for improving maternal health and infant mortality around the world.

I walked to take the funicular up to the mountain with Baroness Shriti Vadera, the Business Minister in Gordon Brown's government. I noticed that one of her fingers was bandaged, and asked her what had happened. "I cut it," she said, "and then did nothing about it for ten days, until it got really bad."

"Wasn't it hurting?"

"In what I'm doing," she replied, "I'm dealing with so much pain every day that I didn't notice mine." Maybe because we were going to an all-women's dinner, I wondered if that was a comment that would only be made by a woman business minister! In fact, the whole evening had a confessional air, mixing the personal and the political -- including the CEO of Pepsi tossing her prepared remarks and talking about how haunted she has been by the image she had seen of a hungry child rummaging for food. And that came after she had confessed that after years of always wearing the same suit in different fabrics and colors, she got out of her comfort zone for the first time as she was dressing for the dinner and wore something completely different that she had bought years ago and had left languishing in her closet. To much appreciative applause, she did a turn to show us her sleek black-and-white dress and coat. Then she went on to tell us what Pepsi is doing to alleviate hunger.

Sarah Brown, Britain's first lady, who spoke, called it the "new face of feminism," while Melinda Gates spoke passionately about the fact that "at the end of the day, what matters is not how much money I gave, or how much I cared but what kind of impact I had... how many lives did I lift up?"

The evening, which began on a personal note from Wendi Murdoch, recounting how her grandmother had died while giving birth to her mother, ended on another personal note when Sarah Brown turned to Cheri Blair and, from the podium, lauded the work and example set by the woman she succeeded at Downing Street. There was a hush in the room, as many of those present were aware of how the two women had barely been on speaking terms. So altogether a great evening, demonstrating both the need to take action to help women around the world and the value of setting aside grudges closer to home.

"Institutional sexism"? Whassat?

Google Reader clips catch up

• V2 Day - how social media is helping roil Italian politics
  Colin McKay plugs a new movement in Italy to change their dire politics and media. Featuring the fabulous Beppe Grillo ("Imagine Robin Williams, but with a lot more impact on the electorate."). and numerous links.
• CellBazaar: A SMS Marketplace in Bangladesh
  Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow [I know, just so easy to imagine]. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to 3838, the shortcode for CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase.
• BBC Homepage Two Months On
  Widgets are a'coming. Better not be endless Gavin'n'Stacey promos ...
  
• The Best Copyright-Free and Government Video Libraries
  From the US, quality variable but some of very high production values. They seem to have some sort of corporate deal with RealPlayer though and nothing's embeddable (except Condi's greatest hits), or copied to YouTube ... they're behind Gordon Brown!
  
• Customer insight and technology
  The eGov Minister puts his size 12 in it by pushing NHS choices and ignoring PatientOpinion. At least he's blogging about it so he can told. That's progress.
  
  
• Pentagon Suspends Military Media Analysts Program
  The power of the New York Times when it girds its loins.
• A paper to sum up the discussion on this blog
  Not the best title in the universe but interesting stuff on Benchmarking in gov 2.0.
• Murdoch The Google Monger?
  "There's a very interesting dynamic going on there in that world where Google is going forward, marching forward, with tremendous momentum," Murdoch said.
• Obama Supporters Using Wiki to Reach Superdelegates, Text Messages to Reach Your Momma
  
  
• A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search
  They're throwing a lot at it but it appears to be an unreachable goal.
• Press releases: spin and propaganda
  HT: Mr Gould. The public aren't fools, most PR assumes they are.
• Answers to the judge’s questions
  James Ball re-asks a Judge's questions to journalists on how they understand the real nature of crime in the UK - it's usually widely wrong.
• Google Maps Now Offers Traffic Predictions
• What the world (and his dog) is thinking about the London Mayoral elections
  Really good but very late tool from Delib which is tracking blog opinion - a UK first I think?
  OpinionTracker
  
  
  
  

Not on Reader

• Bill Vs Barack
  Really bitchy yet oddly touching overview from the New Yorker on the spousest with the leastest who's 'out of time' in a 15' soundbite era.
• Last week's Jeremiah Wright interview on Bill Moyers (PBS) (part 1 of six, other parts)
  Gives a proper context and background. The more I see, the more I like. Wonderful line to Moyers about 'you go to Nigeria and they're wearing a tie in 140 degree Fahrenheit weather because they think that's what it means to be a Christian' - take that (Nigerian Anglican Bishop) Peter Akinola. He also says there have been death threats and bomb threats (which I haven't read).
• Wright At National Press Club This I didn't like. Neither did previous Wright defenders.
  
• Linden Labs is developing a hands free interface (inspired by the Segway. yes, I laughed) and Ren Reynolds sees sexual implications. The dirty bastard. HT. J. Gould.
• Chinese execute Tibetans - "they're shooting them like dogs". NSFW video.
  
  
• Also NSFW video, Amnesty International's new anti-waterboarding advert
• World Leaders. From FirstPost. Far, far funnier 3D than Headcases.
• TES: Liberate and disseminate. How Parliament is handling access to Hansard - you must pay! HT: Radio 4.
  
• Among the archives: America does it bigger and better Guardian reviews Photography museum websites.
  'In the Science Museum, for example, you will find the best selection of photographs online in the Science and Society Photo Library under the heading Doing Business with Us.'
  
• How children’s rights are violated on Facebook Mail & Guardian (CapeTown) - just one form letter after another. Crap customer service kills companies in the end.
  
  
• Remaining posts from TechPresident from the Politics Web 2.0 conference in London (all fascinating):

The Rise of Trickle-Up Politics

Lessons from Dean, John Kerry and Beppe Grillo

Visibility Reach, Participation, & Peer Production

Facebook and Clustering of Ideological Types

Rating Candidate Sites, Dealing with Communication Overload

• And finally, is this not the classic example of a Moral Panic? From the Daily Mail: 'How the web stole our children: Chilling report reveals under-16s spend more than 20 hours a week online'

Mirror to be the first national newspaper killed by the web?

I always notice what the Mirror's up to simply because I used to work for their boss, Sly Bailey, who's one of the most prominent women in business now.

I can still visualise that 'caught in headlights' crossed with bland arrogance look she had from the days when NME publisher IPC Media lost a s**tload of cash in the dotcom boom. Mainly because they took the bland assurances of the sorts of webbie reptiles which flourished then at face value ... and forgot web basics and weren't interested anyhoo.

She's now been with the Mirror for years and has tolerated the most amateurish website on Fleet St also for years. Classic 'La La, I'm not listening' activity ... She never learnt a thing in eight years, it appears.

Just like Michael Grade and ITV, it sounds like she's still getting this back to front. You get the eyeballs, that gives you the revenue. Murdoch got that way back. Conclusion: will the Mirror be the first national newspaper killed by the web?

Trinity Mirror has acquired online web design and development consultancy Rippleffect Studio as part of a plan to diversify revenue streams and increase its interest in sport and leisure media.
The company was bought for an initial £3.2 million with a further £2.6 million conditional on success over the next three years.
Its clients already include Everton, Southampton, Celtic and Fulham football clubs, along with a host of other leisure retail groups.
The acquisition enables Trinity to branch into e-marketing and link other online services with its existing printed sports publications, which includes match-day programmes for several Premier League football clubs.
"This acquisition brings together Trinity Mirror's specialist sports publications and Rippleffect's specialist sports web development under one roof enabling us to substantially grow our revenues in this important sector," said Sly Bailey, Trinity Mirror CEO.
Rippleffect is expected to generate revenues of around £3 million in its first year of ownership, Trinity said in a press release.

All too late for the paper ...

Hat tip: journalism.co.uk

America's pompous journalists

One of the big stories in the US election campaign this week was the resignation of Obama aide Samantha Power after she called Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview with The Scotsman. She was expressing what's been reported in the US as 'background', that this sort of frustration in the Obama camp exists, only here it was being named in print.

What's interesting is the near-universal reaction in America that, somehow, The Scotsman's inclusion of that quote was a typical example of British journalism's 'low ethical standards'. This was exemplified in an interview which MSNBC's Tucker Carlson did with the Scotsman journalist, Gerri Peev.



But what the episode actually highlights is American journalisms willingness to cow-tow to politicians. MSNBC's reporter seems to think it's 'low' to refuse a request from a political aide to take-back something she just said.

American newspapers have a readership far lower than the UK's. The best selling newspaper, USA Today, sells about as much as The Mirror. I find most of them dry and uninteresting with a one-style fits-all approach like they all learned one way to write 'as a professional' and continue to employ it.

There's a 'worthiness' which is boring and maybe this is why their readerships are so low. They don't call the New York Times 'the gray lady' for nothing. It wasn't always so and papers like The New York Post - a Murdoch paper which has regularly had British staff - are good counter-examples.

You can take this too far the other way - most Brits now seem to think all politicians are corrupt, which is rubbish, for example. But US journalism has consistently failed precisely because it cow-tows. In the current campaign they are only now lobbing hard questions at Obama and MSNBC itself has often chauvinistically covered Hillary. The hysteria/uniform approach of the News Channels like MSNBC is a great source of material for the comedic likes of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Iain Martin in The Telegraph:

British newspaper journalism, generally, would not be described as a profession: it is a trade, and there is a crucial difference. It means that the Brits as a breed have tended to be more rumbustious, cheekier, a little more inquisitive and wary of the powerful. There are excesses, but overall the sense is of British journalism being noisier and more vibrant. Competition is fierce, which until the age of the internet it was not in the US. And that might be the problem.

As British media groups, such as the Telegraph and the Guardian, expand on-line into North America and develop large audiences there, tensions have surfaced. US print journalists see the limeys muscling in and think their tactics vulgar. Perhaps they fear competition: after all, it took a British journalist to get behind the PR and spin that Samantha Power has been pushing.

British newspapers were setting American agendas before Peev. Lots of links from Drudge are to British papers and most British papers have an online American readership which exceeds their UK print readership by large margins.

It was noted back in the lead up to the War in Iraq that Americans were turning to British news sources, especially the BBC, because American papers were slavishly following the White House line.

As former BBC Head Greg Dyke said at the Emmy Awards:

For any news organization to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility. They should be balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other. It may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion, but it is what we are here to do.

The Guardian acknowledged the ongoing phenomenon when they set up Guardian America last year. What's driving this is Americans seeking a range of opinions and reacting against their own media. What's clear is that many Americans don't like this phenomenon one bit.

It's truly a clash of values, as Tucker Carlson has amply demonstrated.

Google Reader clips catch up

Latest of my Google Reader starred items:

• Avinash Kaushik has evolved from a 'Taco Bell gournet' since starting working for Google
• He says Customers & Competitors should be used to embarrass HiPPOs (highest paid person’s) on web analytics
• Being a good designer means being an 'omnivore'
• Freezing chips breaks encryption
• Wikipedia and similar sites rely on tiny numbers of free editors
• The Economist notes 'witty' bloggers on DirectGov and eGov
• More daft web ideas from politicians, this time lil'Lord Falconer
• NYT: the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls
• Anti-gay Christians sell books with fellatio
• Charlie Booker had a run-in with an 80 yo on a plane; she survived
  
• Obama doesn't need 'big money' because the Web's proving a fundraising cash cow
• The Australian apology is about intergenerational responsibility
• Robert Fisk wasn't that bovvered by a mysterious impersonator
  
• Internet Explorer is as structurally wonky as the Leaning Tower of Pisa
• Celebs defend Heath Ledger
• Undetectable HIV load means non-infectious
• Simon Dickson loved BarCamp and says 'just do it'
• More churn in online advertising models; the end of networks?
  
• Google Sightseeing now on iPhones
• NT Post (Murdoch) prefers Obama to NY Senator Clinton
• Stephen Fry's podcasts
• Stephen Fry salivates on groovy camera
• Web Power growing in Saudi
• Shit loads of people watch Obama's straight-to-camera State Of The Union response
• Digg gets editors, maybe
• Shock! Fred Thompson's web campaign wasn't half-bad
• Zooming in by satellite on poor bald guys now possible
  
• Who are the Libertarians behind Facebook?
• The Global Village is a reality online
• What are the millionaire Googlers up to?
• Hollywood is toxic
• Online ad campaigns getting better in Primaries
• Candidate websites aren't main go-to source for info
  
• Jeff Jarvis ties online metrics to Pres candidate success
  
• UK Government online marketing led by offline experts: shock
• Privacy International says move to Greece
• Pew Research nails the numbers on Web's political influence
• Northamptonshire gets eDemocracy
• Obama online driving Obama voting numbers
• Crafts, of all things, reinvigorated by the Web
• Best info filtering tips
  

The Battle to Control Obama's Myspace

Bit of history, which won't repeat, being made over Barack Obama's MySpace page.

In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama, inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention.

By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile - which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama - already had more than 30,000 friends, well more than the other contenders.

Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the "MySpace primary."

For several weeks, he collaborated on a daily basis, with the Obama campaign offering advice on how to improve the site, sharing content with him, helping him place a fundraising widget on the site, etc.

He in turn gave the campaign password access to the profile in case they wanted to tweak it quickly, but they made little use of it and relied mainly on Anthony to maintain the site.

On March 17, MySpace announced the creation of the "Impact Channel," which aimed to focused attention on the presidential race, and the Obama campaign had them use Anthony's Obama profile as the site the Impact Channel pointed to.

Obama's friend total rocketed from 100,000 to 140,000 in a week — a huge asset for the campaign. The 'lifetime value' of the page has been estimated now as in the millions:

"Another way of looking at it ... if only 10% of these names were fundraising responsive, they might generate $200 each during the course of the campaign = $3.2 million gross."

The marketing industry charges anything from $1-$3 just for one email address. When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, he paid approximately $31.35 per user

Meanwhile, the campaign had just hired some new staff very experienced at running social network-focused efforts for progressive groups and causes.



It's around this point that the informal working relationship between Anthony and the Obama campaign went sour.

Anthony decided to email the Obama campaign asking to be paid in some way for his time.

This set off discussions within the campaign about what to do, and ultimately they decided they had to control the page — how this then happened hasn't done the campaign any good.

• Although he'd let the Campaign have access to the profile, the fact that they didn't have complete control began to freak out the staffers. They become concerned about the currency and accuracy of information on the site. They saw a disaster waiting to happen
• Anthony was overworked and suggested that they should make him a consultant.
• They said they would rather have a one-time transfer payment, and he should name a price.
• He picked a number. They said no and went to MySpace management for resolution.
• MySpace came up with an equitable solution. Anthony was given no choice and the URL transferred to the campaign. But he has been given the opportunity to build the site again with a different URL and full transfer of his friends list.

Being naive, Anthony had asked for $40k, and this has led many to label him an opportunist.

The way it was dealt with has led him to label the Campaign a 'bully', generating masses of negative media for a Campaign which has presented itself as 'web-friendly'. Plus, this comes not long after the fiasco of the anti-Hilary video, which was a huge hit on YouTube but again wasn't the product of the actual campaign.

The coverage of the fiasco led Obama to ring Anthony himself:

"He said he really appreciates the work I've done. We both agreed that this is new to everyone but there's a lot to be learned. I don't think he actually apologized. He said he stood by his campaign and everything. He was very nice. Exactly what anybody would expect."

MySpace's said:

We are firmly committed to empowering our users and protecting their rights. The situation with Senator Obama's profile became an unfortunate instance where a user gave a campaign functional control of a profile and the relationship between the two broke down. We felt under the circumstances that Senator Obama had the right to the URL containing his name and to the official campaign content that was provided, but that the user should retain the basic elements of the profile, including the friends who had been accumulated. Now that each Presidential candidate controls his/her own MySpace page, we don't expect this to be a problem again.

So this won't happen again.

But it puts future presidential volunteer efforts into a new context.

Other campaigns have tried much looser structures, especially the famous Howard Dean campaign in 2004.

Joe Trippi talks about why in his book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything.

One of his followers commented in the wake of this battle:

The Dean campaign gave us simple instructions, "Speak for yourself. Don't speak for the campaign. But talk about why you're here, why YOU support Dean."

A local cable access channel was hosting a talk show on the candidates. They invited representatives from the various local campaign volunteer groups. I went for the Dean Meetup group in my county. There was a very articulate former reporter representing Clark supporters, and that was it. The Kerry group had agreed to send somebody, but had first checked with the campaign. The campaign said the volunteer would first have to drive 2 hours for a full day of media training before appearing on this small local TV show. The Dean campaign sent me an email telling me how to get local press coverage before I went to Iowa, while I was there, and when I got back. That was all the training I got. I never thought to ask the campaign for permission to be on TV. This was our campaign, and we all felt that.

I went on TV before, during, and after Iowa. When the talk show moderator asked about Dean's positions, I either replied with things I'd read in campaign literature, things I'd heard him say, or my own opinions--clearly stated as such.

Dean supporters started Meetup groups, websites, blogs, and listservs. They held visibility and other events and invited the media. Today I'm sure they would have started pages on MySpace and Facebook. As so many things did in that campaign, they belonged to us, and the campaign brought us in as fast as they could.

Only now, after more campaign experience with other candidates, do I realize how rare it was for a campaign to escape the clutches of the true chattering class, the political consultants.

Democrats drop Fox News

Fox attacks Obama

The Huffington Post | Melinda Henneberger |

The Nevada Democratic Party today backed out of a FOX News-sponsored presidential debate after Fox President Roger Ailes's recent remarks jokingly comparing Democratic Senator Barack Obama to al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

In a joint letter faxed today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Tom Collins, the head of the Nevada Democratic Party, informed Fox News executive producer Marty Ryan of the decision.

"A month ago, the Nevada Democratic Party entered into a good faith agreement with FOX News to co-sponsor a presidential debate in August,'' Reid and Collins said in the letter. "This was done because the Nevada Democratic Party is reaching out to new voters and we strongly believe that a Democrat will not win Nevada unless we find new ways to talk to new people. To say the least, this was not a popular decision. But it is one that the Democratic Party stood by.''

"However, comments made last night by FOX News President Roger Ailes in reference to one of our presidential candidates went too far,'' the letter went on. "We cannot, as good Democrats, put our party in a position to defend such comments. In light of his comments, we have concluded that it is not possible to hold a Presidential debate that will focus on our candidates and are therefore canceling our August debate. We take no pleasure in this, but it is the only course of action.''

FOX ATTACKS - The tactics of Fox News

Doonesbury's interview with Rupert Murdoch about Fox (Faux) News