Faux declares war on Media Matters

For seven years Fox News has pushed back against the daily scrutiny and criticism leveled at it by Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group. But after David Brock, the group’s founder, said in March that his group’s new strategy amounted to a “war on Fox,” Fox ratcheted up its response.

In the past ten days, the news channel has run more than 30 segments calling for the nonprofit group to be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Its Fox Nation website has even provided a link to pre-completed complaint forms against Media Matters to send to the Internal Revenue Service.

Marcus Owens, a partner at Caplin and Drysdale and former director of the Exempt Organization Division of the IRS, says the law is on Media Matters’ side on both counts.

On the training point, there would have to be proof of a direct tie to Democratic organizations, he said....

And on the other, somewhat more vague, point about whether Media Matters’ attacks on Fox violate the IRS’s rules about what tax-exempt educational organizations can say, he points to the criteria that the IRS laid out in 1986 for determining whether the method that the organization uses to come to its conclusions qualifies it as an educat entity.

First among these is that the organization not present “viewpoints or positions unsupported by facts” as “a significant portion of the organization’s communications.” Also on the list is a ban on “substantial use of inflammatory and disparaging terms” and conclusions made “on the basis of strong emotional feelings” rather than “objective evaluations."