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So the news is out that Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's Communications Director, is going to join Fox news. Here's his statement, which Markos has already debunked: "[Fox News has] a huge audience, and it is important to have a strong, progressive voice on the network."
While this is being touted as a sort of 'strange bedfellows' story, with the Clinton Democrat going on Fox News, the reality is that Wolfson and the Clintonista world have long financial and personal links to Rupert Murdoch. Wolfson in fact lobbied for Newscorp in his multi-year lucrative career as a lobbyist for conservative corporate interests, giving us a good reason to question whether he in fact has such a 'strong, progressive voice'.
Here's the backstory to this new arrangement. Wolfson came from the Clinton campaign as a senior partner in the lobbying firm the Glover Park Group, and handled among other clients Verizon, Cablevision, and Newscorp. For either Verizon and/or Cablevision, the Glover Park Group worked against net neutrality, releasing fraudulent polling data designed to put political pressure on the pro-net neutrality forces. The poll was so badly designed that it revealed that Americans both had not heard of net neutrality and that Americans wanted to gut net neutrality and pass a new telecom reform bill.
The telecom stuff is run of the mill for DC, and illustrates the networks of operatives and lobbyists that live, work, and make money here. What is actually interesting is Wolfson's work for Newscorp in 2004. He joined a corporate battle between Newscorp and Nielsen over how viewers would be counted, and whether the counting system would be automated and upgraded. When Nielsen piloted a system to automate counting viewing audiences for TV shows, the system dramatically reduced the number of black and Latino TV viewers. Since Newscorp had a lot of minority viewers, this new system, even if accurate, would reduce their advertising revenues.
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