So far this cycle we've seen reports of News Corp -- the parent company of Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network – handing out $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Media Matters has also noted that more than 30 Fox News personalities have supported Republicans in 600-plus instances during the midterms elections.

Now the New York Times is reporting that just one week before tomorrow's election, Fox Business devoted five hours of airtime during its “War on Business” coverage to a California ballot initiative that New Corp. donated $1.3 million to kill. Not surprisingly, the network failed to disclose the contribution:

Call it the War on Proposition 24.

The News Corporation is one of the many major media companies that have spent more than $1 million each seeking to defeat the proposition, which supporters say would repeal $1.7 billion in corporate tax breaks to help close the state's budget gap.

Executives at media companies, which employ tens of thousands in the entertainment industry, say defeating the proposition is one of their biggest priorities in the midterm elections, and they question how they would continue to operate in the state if taxes go up.

In five consecutive hours of live reports on Tuesday, a Fox Business correspondent, Adam Shapiro, was stationed at Cambridge of California, a small furniture manufacturing facility in Gardena. Mr. Shapiro repeatedly said the proposition could drive businesses — specifically small businesses, not media titans — out of California, and he said “332,000 jobs” were “on the line.”

Tracy Byrnes, the anchor for one of the reports, expressed the opinion that “the proposition was setting up businesses to be destroyed, quite frankly.”

Yet in its expanded coverage of the issue, Fox did not disclose the News Corporation's donation to a group working to defeat Proposition 24. Nor did Fox report that the small-business man it featured in the news reports was asked to do the interview by the same group, No on 24 — Stop the Jobs Tax.

A Fox Business executive said he had not known about the parent company's donation. Industry observers, however, said the News Corporation's contribution to the group, and the organization's role in arranging the interview, raised a potential conflict of interest that warranted disclosure.

[...]

Local stations in California, including those owned by CBS and NBC, have covered the proposition without disclosing their corporate contributions. But no news outlet has covered the issue as aggressively as Fox Business, the three-year-old sibling of Fox News.

Kevin Magee, an executive vice president at Fox Business, said in an interview on Friday, “We didn't know that News Corporation had made a contribution to No for 24.” He said such disclosures were normal “if you know it and if it's germane to the story.” He said that had he known in this case, he thought the network would have disclosed the donation.

h/t ThinkProgress