Fox News says it has nothing to apologize for after 400 rabbis
issued an open letter asking the network to tone down host Glenn Beck's use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery.
"We haven't seen the ad, but this group is a George Soros backed left-wing political organization that has been trying to engage Glenn Beck primarily for publicity purposes," Fox News development VP Joel Cheatwood
told Yahoo!News in a statement.
But one of the letter's signatories, Rabbi Will Berkovitz,
told MSNBC's Cenk Uygur that the letter was signed by rabbis from all over the political spectrum, ranging from far left to orthodox conservatives.
The rabbis, who signed a letter organized by Jewish Funds for Justice, on Thursday took out an ad in the
Wall Street Journal -- which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- calling on the network to sanction Glenn Beck for what they see as his excessive use of Holocaust and Nazi references.
They also criticized Fox News President Roger Ailes for dismissing Beck's Jewish critics as "left-wing rabbis."
The rabbis took particular issue with
a series Beck ran on his radio and TV shows in November covering the life of George Soros, a progressive financier that Beck believes to be at the center of a conspiracy to destroy the US.
"It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps,"
the rabbis said of the Soros series. "It is not appropriate to call executives of another news agency 'Nazis.' And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree."
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/fox-dismisses-rabbis-glenn-beck-complaint/