WASHINGTON (AFP) – Roger Ailes, chairman of News Corp.'s Fox News Channel, apologized Thursday for describing executives of National Public Radio as "Nazis," the Anti-Defamation League said. Ailes lashed out at NPR in an interview with news and opinion website The Daily Beast over its firing of a commentator, saying executives of the publicly funded radio network "have a kind of Nazi attitude."
"They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view," he said. "They don?t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda.
"They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive," Ailes said in a reference to a now shuttered liberal radio station.
The Anti-Defamation League said Ailes had apologized in a letter to ADL national director Abraham Foxman.
"I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word," the ADL quoted Ailes as saying.
"I welcome Roger Ailes apology, which is as sincere as it is heartfelt," said Foxman, a Holocaust survivor. "Nazi comparisons of this nature are clearly inappropriate and offensive.
"While I wish Roger had never invoked that terminology, I appreciate his efforts to immediately reach out and to retract his words before they did any further harm," Foxman said.
Ailes' comments triggered a flood of messages on Twitter with the hashtag #NPRgoesNazi in which users of the service mocked his remarks by replacing the names of the radio network's popular programs with Third Reich names.
