Saturday’s New York Times featured a story by Brian Stelter about the intersection of political campaigning and the cable news channels.
As one would expect, the right-leaning Fox News Channel and left-leaning MSNBC get prominent play. The article notes a number of instances where Republican candidates were able to ask for money and put their campaign websites on FNC programs, and some cases where candidates like Sharron Angle said that they wanted to appear on programming that was friendly to their campaigns.
There was also this quote from MSNBC president Phil Griffin:
Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, and others strenuously object to the idea that Fox and MSNBC are opposite sides of the same coin. “Show me an example of us fund-raising,” he said in a recent interview.
Griffin may not have been able to name any, but bloggers and journalists did some digging and came up with instances of fundraising that was very similar to what is happening at FNC.
Johnny Dollar found a plethora of examples, most of them from MSNBC’s 6 PM program hosted by Ed Schultz. The Baltimore Sun‘s David Zurawik, who was first to report a particularly egregious example of fundraising by FNC’s Sean Hannity, adds his take here.