Why are taxpayers subsidizing the left's war on Fox News?

Former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray has an excellent op-ed out this week which pointedly asks: How on earth can an organization like Media Matters possibly maintain its 501(c)3 non-profit tax status when its primary goal is shutting down the First Amendment rights of Fox News?  It's worth a read:

MMA’s activities should disallow its tax-exempt status in two fundamental ways. First, IRS rulings make clear that attacks on individuals, statement of positions that are unsupported by facts and use of inflammatory language and other distortions will cost an organization its tax-free status. Second, in declaring “guerrilla warfare” on Fox as the “leader” and “mouthpiece” of the Republican Party and in developing a sophisticated Democratic-leaning media training boot camp, MMA has transformed itself into an aggressive advocate for Democratic and progressive causes and thus produced a second deviation from exempt educational activities.

MMA’s role as a Democratic training camp parallels exactly the operations of the American Campaign Academy (ACA), which was denied tax-exempt status by the IRS in 1989. ACA operated a school of intensive training for people planning to be campaign professionals. The facts showed, however, that most of the program’s graduates were Republicans, as were the officials who ran it and the funders who donated to it, and it was based on materials developed by the Republican National Committee.

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