John Moody (journalist)

John Moody is Executive Editor and Executive VP of Fox News.^[1] He was previously Chief Executive Officer of NewsCore, the former internal wire service of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,^[2] and Senior Vice President, News Editorial for the Fox News Channel before that.

Early life, education and career

Moody was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1975, he graduated from Cornell University and began working for United Press International, serving successively as the Moscow and Paris bureau chief.

Afterwards, he went to work for Time, serving as the Vatican correspondent and Rome bureau chief,^[3] from 1986 as the Latin American bureau chief, and finally as the New York bureau chief. As NY bureau chief, Moody was against the 1996 Time/Warner buyout of Turner Broadcasting. He instructed his staff "not to co-operate" with CNN which he saw as a competitor to Time.

In 1992, Moody received the Inter-American Press Association Bartholomew Mitre Award for his interview with Cali cartel kingpin Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela.

As a Fox News executive, Moody received attention for circulating internal memos which have been described as encouraging political bias in Fox's reporting.^[4] Moody's memos were featured in Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.^[5]

In January 2007, after three separate Fox News shows had repeated the Insight magazine story about Barack Obama having attended a radical madrassa school as a child, Moody had to backtrack:^[6]

And in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. "The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about," Mr. Moody said. "They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know."

Moody again became involved in racial controversy in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, seizing on a story about a John McCain volunteer who claimed to have been violently assaulted by a black attacker who carved a letter "B" into her face, ordering her to vote for Obama. Moody claimed that this "had to happen" and, if true, would cause voters to "suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee [Obama]. If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain's quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting."^[7] Within hours the story was exposed as a fabrication, and Moody was widely accused of attempting to stir up a racially based voter movement away from Barack Obama.^[8]

On August 15, 2008, Moody wrote an editorial lambasting John Murtha for saying, "There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area." Moody, a native of west Pennsylvania, said Murtha can "go to hell" and called him a "jagoff."

Personal life

Moody lives in New Jersey with his wife Alexandra and his children, Kate and John Peter.

Works

• John Moody and Ropger Boyes, The Priest Who Had to Die, Gollancz (June 1, 1986), ISBN 978-0-575-03830-1
• John Moody, Moscow Magician: A Thriller, St. Martin's Press (January 14, 1991), ISBN 978-0-312-05473-1
• John Moody, Kiss It Good-Bye: The Mystery, The Mormon, and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, Shadow Mountain (March 3, 2010), ISBN 978-1-60641-149-0

References

External links

• Archive at Fox News
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Works by or about John Moody in libraries (WorldCat catalog)