Why I Am Grateful for the Fox News Audience

At a pre-Thanksgiving event yesterday I remarked to some friends how generous the Fox audience is.
"Fox News?" they asked incredulously."Yes," I replied, "I am overwhelmed by their generosity."

I have been at Fox News for fourteen years. I have been so blessed and lucky by the people I have met here.

Tuesday's discussion was prompted by the over five hundred people who bought goats, wheelchairs, crosses made by polio survivors and "Sacks of Hope" (that the name we've given to survival kits for returnees from north Sudan) after a segment I did on "Fox & Friends" aired on Monday morning.

None of our volunteers at Goats for the Old Goat.org were prepared for this kind of outpouring for the people in the new country of South Sudan in Africa.

After two million deaths and twenty-two years of war with the Arab North, the Christian South is finally free. South Sudan is free but some of the "booty" of war, live human beings, are still trapped in the north as slaves. They can't read, are not allowed to talk to others from the South and do not know the war has ended.

The group I work with, Christian Solidarity International has been working with Arab slave retrievers to bring these people home to their villages and to peace.

In my years at Fox News Channel I have been so fortunate. I have met my new business partners on the set.
I have formed lifelong friendships and although a liberal in my heart I have made wonderful conservative friends. -- We don't agree on politics but we agree on almost everything else including human values.

This Thanksgiving I am so grateful for the good viewers and staff at Fox News. It shocks my friends on the left that this liberal is so amazed at the kind, generous viewers and friends I have made at Fox News.

And, to be honest, it also saddens me that my liberal friends don't get it. There's so much that we share, that we have in common as Americans, it's a shame that the Fox audience is so easily dismissed.

That's why, more than ever, this Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for your generosity, dear friends of Fox News.

Ellen Ratner is Washington bureau chief for Talk Radio News Service and a Fox News contributor.