Thread: Ports deal undone

Now I hear that FOX and News Corp have had huge chunks of controlling interest having been purchased by a Saudi Prince.

Can you get any references on this? I would like to talk to as many of our congressmen as I can about this tomorrow.

This is another outrage against our country!!

Yeah, it's over a 5% ownership.

There's an article floating around where he bragged about how he got Fox to stop running a crawl about "Muslim Riots" in France, having them change it to something like "the riots are the result of povertyand racism", or something like that.

I'll find it and attach it to this thread.

Here it is.

WASHINGTON -- Accuracy in Media (AIM) is urging a full inquiry into a report that a Saudi billionaire caused the Fox News Channel (FNC) to dramatically alter its coverage of the Muslim riots in France after he called the network to complain. The Saudi billionaire, Al-waleed bin Talal, is a friend of News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and controls an influential number of voting shares in the company.

"This report underscores the danger of giving foreign interests a significant financial stake in U.S. media companies," declared Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media.

The controversial comments came at an Arab media conference featuring representatives of Time magazine, USA Today, PBS, The Wall Street Journal, and other news organizations. The conference and the Saudi Prince's growing influence in News Corporation are among the subjects of a new December-A AIM Report that has just been posted at the AIM website (www.aim.org). The report raises the specter of Arab money influencing News Corporation and other U.S. media companies.

Liberal journalist Danny Schechter, a participant in the conference, reports that Al-waleed, who is a member of the Saudi Royal Family and investor in the Fox News parent company News Corporation, gave an interview boasting that he had called Fox to complain about coverage of the "Muslim riots" in France. He said he "called as a viewer" and "convinced them to change" the coverage because "they were not Muslim riots but riots against poverty and inequality." And "they changed" the coverage, the Saudi reportedly said.

Another report on the comments, carried by the Dubai-based newspaper the Khaleej Times, says that Al-waleed personally called Rupert Murdoch to complain. The Saudi said, "After a short while, there was a change" in the coverage.

An AIM call to Fox News asking for comment was not returned.

This is not the first time that Al-waleed has made controversial statements. His $10 million contribution to a 9/11 fund was rejected when he blamed the terror attacks on U.S. Middle East policy. Fifteen of the 19 terrorist hijackers on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia.

Accuracy In Media (AIM) is a non-profit, grassroots citizens watchdog of the news media that critiques botched and bungled news stories and sets the record straight on important issues that have received slanted coverage.

http://www.aim.org/press_release/4222_0_19_0_C

Here's another article:

Buying Fox News
By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 13, 2005

Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal boasted in Dubai earlier this week about his ability to change the news content that viewers around the world see on television.

In early September 2005, Bin Talal bought 5.46% of voting shares in News Corp. This made the Fifth richest man on the Forbes World's Richest People, the fourth largest voting shareholder in News Corp., the parent of Fox News. News Corp. is the world's leading newspaper publisher in English. It operates more than 175 newspapers, in the UK, Australia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the US, and distributes more than 40 million papers per week. In addition, News Corp. owns and operates an international collection of TV outlets, radio stations, magazines, book publishers and film studios.

After bin Talal purchased his voting shares in News Corp., on September 23, 2005, he stated in an advertising supplement to the New York Times, “When I invest in a group like CITICROUP, the Four Seasons, the News Corp. or Time Warner, my objective is not to manage those companies.” But this is not quite accurate, considering the Prince’s December 5, 2005 statement given to Middle East Online regarding his ability to change what viewers see on Fox News. Covering the riots in Paris last November, Fox ran a banner saying: "Muslim riots." Bin Talal was not happy. "I picked up the phone and called Murdoch... (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty," he said. "Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."

News Corp did not comment, but referred us to FOX NEWS, which responded with the following statement: “Over the course of our extensive coverage, it became clear that the Paris riots were caused by a number of different factors which we characterized in various ways as we continued to report the story and discover new information. In fact, one of our contributors, Father Morris, who was in Paris covering this story, was prominently on our air saying this was a cultural assimilation issue, not a religious one.”

However, there is evidence to the contrary as documented by international terrorism expert B. Raman. He wrote that “Pakistani, Algerian and Moroccan members of the London-based Hizbut Tehrir (HT)” mobilized and sustained the riots. Also, the Parisian editor of Valeurs Actuelles, Michel Gurfinkiel observed that, “the fact remains that only ethnic youths are rioting, that most of them explicitly pledge allegiance to Islam and such Muslim heroes as Osama bin Laden, that the Islamic motto - Allahu Akbar - is usually their war cry, and that they submit only to archconservative or radical imams.”

Interviewed on December 2, 2005, by the Financial Times, bin Talal elaborated further, “When I meet Mr Murdoch of News Corp, that owns Fox News, and BSkyB, or when I meet Mr Parsons, who controls CNN, Fortune magazine, People, Time, America Online, I don’t intrude into the management of these companies. However, I do convey to them the message about where I believe they went wrong. It’s their discretion to decide what to do. My job is to open their eyes to things they may not have seen.” If indeed he was successful changing FOX NEWS’ reports of the Paris riots, he got a big bang for his bucks.

And bin Talal is not alone in the Saudi efforts to silence criticism of its drive to spread its national religion, Wahhabism, around the world, and to hide its agenda. Using the British libel laws, which are pro-plaintiff, Khalid bin Mahfouz has sued, or threatened to sue, more than 30 publishers and authors, including Dr. Ehrenfeld. These lawsuits served to chill media reports naming individual Saudis involved in financing terrorist organizations.

Controlling the news media seems to fit into the Saudis long-term plan, which Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal revealed on December 6, 2005.

In the preparatory ministerial conference to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), al Faisal laid out a 10-year "plan of action to confront the challenges of the 21st century." The 57-nation Organization held a meeting last week, to approve the "Mecca Declaration." The heart of the declaration, according to the Prince, is to change the “harsh offensive on Islam from enemies abroad and some of its own children with deviant ideologies".

The Turkish OIC secretary general, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, praised the “Mecca Declaration” as the “roadmap for Islamic common action".

Bin Talal has been advocating for years that this policy can be best achieved by leveraging Arab wealth. On May 1, 2002, in an interview with Lachlan Carmichael for the Saudi daily Arab News, Bin Talal stressed the importance of developing an Arab economic dominance over the U.S. Instead of boycotting American businesses, he said, “Arabs… stand more to benefit from maintaining trade ties with the US because the trade balance between the Arabs and the US is in our favor."

The Arab News reported that according to bin Talal, Arab countries can influence US decision-making. He said: "if they [Arabs] unite through economic interests,” they would achieve influence over the U.S. decision makers. “We have to be logical and understand that the US administration is subject to US public opinion," he said.

Bin Talal concluded in the 2002 Arab News interview: “to bring the decision-maker on your side, you not only have to be active inside the US Congress or the administration but also inside US society."

And bin Talal is moving fast. On December 5, Reuters reported from Dubai that bin Talal complained: “We in the Arab world are not doing the job of explaining ourselves properly.” To remedy the situation, and to bring the proper message to America’s brightest minds, bin Talal said that he established special centers dealing with Arab and Islamic studies at Harvard and Georgetown universities. In addition, he announced his plan to shortly launch a television channel called ”The Message,” which, within two years will broadcast to the United States to “spread the right message”.

A free press is one of the pillars of Democracy. We should do everything to ensure that it stays that way.

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/R ... p?ID=20490

Any questions?

What, Foxnews is in the pockets of the globalists elite? Shocker!

I imagine that their interest in working against terrorism is the same as the Saudis; they want us to protect them from it.

Other than that, they could give a rat's patootie about what happens to us or anyone else.

Point well spoken. But what possessed our gov't to get into bed with these people to begin with. Why can't they see that these shaky kingdoms or "emirates" only want protection from their own people should the people decide to revolt. Kuwait is a similar circumstance.

I was IN Saudi Arabia when the Iraqis took Kuwait. The Saudis couldn't kiss US behinds fast enough when they discovered that they were going to be next. Now that President Bush botched it all up by "spreading democracy" that effectively allowed the people the others fear since they took over Iran, the Shi'ites to have some control in Iraq, they all must be quaking in their boots.

Regarding the Saudis owning 5.something percent of FOX, that doesn't bother me one bit. What bothers me is that we turn over CONTROLLING interest in American companies to so many foreigners. And I don't mean just Arab-world foreigners, either. Who owns our banks? Who owns our grocery stores? And who let them buy this stuff?

A couple of weeks ago, US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez was in Saudi Arabia talking about Saudi-US commercial partnerships and how they are a economic priority for the Bush administration. The treatment of Dubai Ports World undermines everything he said. It is tragic. There are good American companies, good American people working here in Saudi Arabia and in the region.

They can come home and work. After all, we've got such a severe labor shortage here, that we have to bring in millions of illegal aliens to fill the jobs.

Only problem is, WavTek, the jobs most of those people are doing no longer exist in the US. And, if they did, there wouldn't be illegals working them because many require top security clearances.

Perhaps we have now given them enough of our defense equipment that they all think they can defend themselves. But I sort of doubt they can.

So Bush is now woried about our standing within the Arab community since this deal was rightly shut down. Kind of funny how he didn't seem to care too much about the concerns of Arab opinion when he launched what many Arabs consider an illegal invasion and war in an Arab country. I guess dropping bombs and missiles are OK, but dropping a deal is not.

Look People, there are alot of people who think as Globalists that they are "insulated", that they are "in" the elite group, that they are "sheltered" from the outfall.

We the People spoke.

We the People have more to speak about.

We the People are the only friends we really have.

We the People have to stick together and use the middle finger to flick the scum away from US.

We the People of the United States are in danger from every imaginable direction.

We the People know it, because we feel it and we see it.

We the People did the right thing taking control of our ports.

We the People had a beginning of taking our country back with this deal.

We the People have sooo much more to do and it's going to make some people in some high-up places alittle bit "upset".

We the People are going to see and hear alot of whining from this camp.

We the People need to enjoy it, not fear it.

We the People won an inning.

We the People have a whole season to go.

Congratulations America!!

Be Proud!!

Ya done good.