John Moody is an American journalist. He served as the executive editor and the executive vice president of
Fox News
The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...
. He was previously the chief executive officer of NewsCore, the former internal wire service of Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation
News Corporation (abbreviated News Corp.), also variously known as News Corporation Limited, was an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Ne ...
(the then-parent company of
20th Century Fox
20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm of Walt Dis ...
and Fox News), as well as senior vice president, news editorial, for the
Fox News Channel
The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...
prior to that.
Early life, education and career
Moody was born in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...
. Moody is a 1975 graduate of
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
, where he worked for
WVBR-FM. He then began working for
United Press International
United Press International (UPI) is an American international news agency whose newswires, photo, news film, and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations for most of the 20th ...
, serving successively as the
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
and
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
bureau chief.
Afterwards, Moody went to work for ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
,'' serving as the Vatican correspondent and bureau chiefs for Rome, Latin America and finally New York. As the N.Y. bureau chief, Moody was against the 1996 Time/Warner buyout of
Turner Broadcasting
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (alternatively known as Turner Entertainment Networks from 2019 until 2022) was an American television and media conglomerate. Founded by Ted Turner and based in Atlanta, Georgia, it merged with Time Warner (lat ...
. 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
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA; Spanish: ''Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa'', SIP) is a press advocacy group representing major media organizations in North America, South America and the Caribbean. It is made up of more than 1,3 ...
Bartholomew Mitre Award for his interview with
Cali cartel
The Cali Cartel ( es, Cartel de Cali) was a drug cartel based in southern Colombia, around the city of Cali and the Valle del Cauca. Its founders were the brothers Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela. They broke away f ...
kingpin
Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela
Gilberto is the Iberian and Italian version of the originally Norman-French given name ''Gilbert'', used in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish languages. In Galician, it's spelled Xilberto or Xilberte. ''Gilbert'' is ultimately derived from the Ger ...
.
An anti-Fox News documentary, ''
Outfoxed
''Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism'' is a 2004 documentary film by filmmaker Robert Greenwald about Fox News Channel's and its owner's, Rupert Murdoch, promotion of conservative views. The film says this bias belies the channel's mott ...
,'' accused Moody of circulating internal memos encouraging political bias in Fox's reporting.
After three different Fox News shows in January 2007 repeated an ''
Insight
Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect within a particular context. The term insight can have several related meanings:
*a piece of information
*the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intu ...
'' magazine story about
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
attending a radical madrassa school as a child, Moody said Fox "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. They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn't know."
On August 15, 2008, Moody wrote an editorial lambasting
John Murtha
John Patrick Murtha Jr. (; June 17, 1932 – February 8, 2010) was an American politician from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Murtha, a Democrat, represented Pennsylvania's 12th congressional district in the United States House of Represent ...
for saying, "There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area." As a native of west Pennsylvania, Moody said Murtha can "go to hell" and called him a "jagoff."
On February 8, 2018, Moody wrote an editorial arguing that the
U.S. Olympic Committee
The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) is the National Olympic Committee and the National Paralympic Committee for the United States. It was founded in 1895 as the United States Olympic Committee, and is headquartered in Col ...
wants to change the Olympic Games' motto to "Darker, Gayer, Different." "No sport that we are aware of awards points — or medals — for skin color or sexual orientation," Moody said. Fox News pulled the column, stating that it did "not reflect the views or values of FOX News." In March 2018, he retired from Fox News.
In 2018, former
Fox News
The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...
executive
Ken LaCorte recruited Moody and former
NPR
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
editorial director
Michael Oreskes
Michael Oreskes (; born May 26, 1954) is an American journalist who worked at the ''New York Daily News'' and for 20 years at ''The New York Times''. Oreskes later became the vice president and senior managing editor at the Associated Press befor ...
to launch LaCorte News, a digital news startup "restoring faith in media."
An investigation by ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' in November 2019 found that LaCorte was using "Russian tactics" to disseminate divisive content via websites he covertly controlled.
Works
*John Moody and Ropger Boyes, ''The Priest Who Had to Die'', Gollancz (June 1, 1986),
*John Moody, ''Moscow Magician: A Thriller'', St. Martin's Press (January 14, 1991),
*John Moody, ''Kiss It Good-Bye: The Mystery, The Mormon, and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates'', Shadow Mountain (March 3, 2010),
*John Moody, ''Of Course They Knew, Of Course They ...'', Brick Tower Press / J.T. Colby & Company (September 11, 2021),
References
External links
Archive at Fox News*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moody, John
American male journalists
Cornell University alumni
Living people
Writers from Pittsburgh
Year of birth missing (living people)
Fox News people
Journalists from Pennsylvania