ailes 2 bkup
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see pseudo populism
liberal media BS
see hannity talk radio
brings talk radio to TV limbaugh
AILES
html negritude
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roger ailes laid fdn for end of the world? without fox no tea party? no trump? covid faIL post death but teed up
funny fox never got tagged w/ jrnlism fail b/c it was expected/normal
120 aha: jeez beck and fox have been fuelling fake populism from at least the TP; cf ailes loudest voice based on gab sherman: anti-govt wacko?
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OMG SEE FIASCO BENGHAZI MIKE SCHMIDT HAD HILLARY EMAIL HRD22 ? BUT ASSUMED SHE ALSO USES AN OFFICIAL ACCT? INVESTIGATTOR MIL INTEL ON 2ND TREY GOWDY SPECIAL COMM DID NOT SEE PROBLEM
THINKING MAN’S TP? BOEHNER LONGTOME PAL OF AILES; APPROVED OF 2ND BS COMM IF HE WD GET THE “CRAZIES” TO BACK OFF?! BLACK HELOS, MADE SAFE RM IN HOUSE ~ SPY, ARMED SECURITY TO ~ ASSASSINATION?!
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black room dirty trick ops?! PI spy on enemies
Fox News And Roger Ailes’ Secret Black Room Team – AN SIONNACH FIONN
Fox News And Roger Ailes’ Secret Black Room Team
DOCU 2018
It's easy to make someone a monster' - behind a Roger Ailes documentary
divide-and-conquer-roger-ailes-documentary-alexis-bloom
In Divide and Conquer, film-maker Alexis Bloom tackles the infamous Fox News head whose business smarts were offset by a history of sexually predatory behavior
ROger Ailes was a genius. He realized that short skirts and blond hair combined with heavy doses of racist fearmongering and hysterical patriotism could hook a cable TV audience of mostly old white male Americans, especially the type who thought of themselves as hardcore conservatives but who in fact were eager to get on board with the zaniest conspiracy theories – Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya – as long as it vindicated and reinforced their pinched worldview.
Then Ailes turned around and scammed those same viewers by showing them promos for dubious products such as gold coins alongside ads for products those viewers actually needed: weight loss, psoriasis treatment, insurance and portable oxygen. The proceeds, plus a mountain of fees from cable and satellite distributors – to the tune of $4.42bn in quarterly revenue for Fox’s cable division – were passed straight up the corporate chain to Rupert Murdoch and sons.
It can be argued that Ailes’s political products were even more spurious than the emergency gold. Recent work by the Stanford academics Gregory J Martin and Ali Yurukoglu has indicated that Fox News was stunningly successful at helping to elect George W Bush twice, and the network remade itself as a state media arm for Donald Trump, two presidencies devoted to making sure rich people – not the core Fox News viewership – have the tools to stay that way.
Behind the scenes, we now know, Ailes was engaging in serial sexual harassment, and he presided over a culture that marginalized and demeaned women, the extent of which was a shocking discovery when it came to light through a lawsuit brought in 2016 by the former host Gretchen Carlson – shocking even given the blatant game of sexual objectification and titillation on display in most every Fox News broadcast.
But there was another side to Ailes, who died in May 2017. He was more than unusually good at television, and more than unusually committed to owning the liberals, and he knew a thing or two about human nature, and he was very ambitious, and he loved to be a star, and he never claimed to be a journalist. And you can’t argue with the popularity of the network he built or its influence.
Thus duty-bound, one wades into the Ailes life story, which is thankfully told with both journalistic verve and human sensitivity in the new documentary Divide and Conquer, directed by Alexis Bloom, who won a Producers Guild of America award for her 2013 film We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.
Should you miss Divide and Conquer, be advised that it is merely the leading edge of a breaking wave of cultural content centered on Ailes, with upcoming offerings including a Showtime series with Naomi Watts and Russell Crowe and an Adam McKay-directed film starring John Lithgow as Ailes and Charlize Theron as former Fox host Megyn Kelly, whose own story of harassment helped end Ailes’s career.
The Divide and Conquer film-makers set out to balance the story of Ailes’s brilliance with the reality of his corrosiveness, said Bloom.
“I think the two things coexist in reality, and you have to find some way to make them coexist in the film,” she said. “It’s not true to life if you come out that he’s just pernicious and monstrous. Neither that he was a genius. He was both.”
There’s a debate to be had about whether the film gets that balance right, considering the havoc wreaked by Fox News on the country, embodied by the current president. Political scientists have measured rapidly growing political polarization in the United States which has in turn been linked to the rise of siloed media of which Fox News is the apotheosis. That polarization has diminished the quality of the elected leadership while breeding a sense of alienation and suspicion among the populace.
While Divide and Conquer does not go deep on the changes wrought to America by Fox News, the film does a good job of getting former Fox News personalities to speak about Ailes, including Glenn Beck, whose interview on camera is a masterpiece of pseudo-insightful mumbo-jumbo....
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npr jul 2016 david f
The news that sexual harassment allegations have cost Roger Ailes his job threatens to obscure Ailes' singular career and his almost unrivaled influence in the public sphere.
But no contemporary figure has done more to shape the intersection of American media and politics than Ailes, who, until Thursday, had been the Fox News chief since its very first day on the air in 1996.
In his long career, Ailes advised a succession of Republican presidents on how to gain power and maintain it — both on their payrolls and off the books.
He showed how to bring flair and flash to financial coverage as president of CNBC.
Then Ailes gave a turbo boost to the Republican movement in the mid-1990s, just in time to fuel opposition to the Clinton White House, with the creation of Fox News. It was a partnership and mind meld between Ailes and his new patron, media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Roger Ailes, Accused Of Sexual Harassment, Out As Chairman Of Fox News
Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard and a familiar figure on Fox News, told me the new network gave conservatives hope.
"They were so used to thinking that the media was completely barren as far as they were concerned," Barnes said. "There was nothing there for them. It was all for liberals. And then Fox comes along — and they really glommed on it."
Fox served as the home of debate within the conservative movement. At its default setting, Fox blended pugilistic, right-of-center populism, resentment of changing demographics and sexual mores, and a strong nationalistic tone.
Fox News' success also drove television news as a whole more toward conflict, given its emphasis on assertion over reporting.
From Entertainment To Politics
Fred Barnes spoke to me outside the arena for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. It was perhaps fitting that the end game for Ailes played out as Republicans gathered there.
Ailes, an Ohio native, enjoyed his first big professional success in Cleveland, as a producer of a local variety and talk program called The Mike Douglas Show.
In time, the show went national. So did Ailes.
After Richard Nixon appeared on the show during the 1968 campaign, Ailes gave the candidate some advice: use televised appearances to go around the press and interact with voters. More to the point, be seen interacting with voters.
Enlarge this image
Roger Ailes was a political consultant in 1971, advising many leading Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Karl Rove.
Jerry Mosey/AP
In one such encounter, former college football coach Bud Wilkinson, a Nixon fan and friend, served as moderator. "No one has any idea what questions will be asked," Wilkinson told viewers. "Mr. Nixon cannot possibly know. His answers must be immediate and direct — and our panel is representative."
In reality, the panelists were pretty carefully screened.
Ailes ended up advising the Nixon White House. He also rose to be executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show, which lasted for thousands of episodes. Ailes dabbled in Broadway, producing two shows, including The Hot l Baltimore.
He advised President Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984, helping Reagan revive his fortunes following a disastrous first debate against Walter Mondale.
Reagan dominated the second debate with remarks that became political legend. Pressed on his age, for example, Reagan said, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." Reagan never looked back.
Ailes kept toggling between producing television specials and serving as a political consultant, sometimes doing both at once.
In 1988, Ailes played a key role in George H.W. Bush's White House bid. A climactic moment arrived early that year. Ailes warned Bush that CBS News anchor Dan Rather was primed to go after him on the Iran-Contra scandal during a live interview. The conversation turned testy.
Bush ordinarily displayed a patrician reserve. Ailes goaded Bush to rumble. When pressed by Rather, the vice president roared back, "It's not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?"
Bush was jabbing Rather over a 1987 incident in which the network delayed the start of CBS Evening News to carry the end of a U.S. Open tennis match. Rather, infuriated, walked off the set (on location in Miami, not New York). When the match ended, the network went black for more than six minutes before Rather returned.
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Former Fox News Anchor Gretchen Carlson Sues Roger Ailes For Harassment
That year, Ailes published the book, You Are the Message, a primer on how candidates and corporate executives should communicate with the public. He proceeded to manage several unsuccessful Republican campaigns, starting with Rudy Giuliani's first mayoral bid in New York City in 1989.
Ailes left politics once more, though hardly definitively. He produced Rush Limbaugh's radio show and then joined CNBC to build it up into a recognizable version of what the channel is today.
The Era Of Fox News
He later jumped at the chance to run Rupert Murdoch's Fox News — defined as an alternative to the liberal media at its launch in fall 1996.
Roger Ailes (left) speaks at a news conference with Rupert Murdoch in January 1996 after it was announced Ailes would be chairman and CEO of Fox News.
Fox built up momentum during the impeachment process of President Bill Clinton and then surged after the disputed 2000 presidential election and the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
The channel draped itself in patriotism — a constant Ailes refrain. Fox would become the top-rated cable news channel and has remained so ever since.
Before Thursday evening, many with ties to the network said there is no way to disentangle what they felt about Fox from what they felt about Ailes.
"At Fox, everything is due to Roger," Fred Barnes said. "It was entirely his vision. And what he created — one guy creating that. I'm still amazed."
News reports were often straight ahead. But common themes cropped up on the opinion shows, including some racial undercurrents.
In a 2009 appearance on Fox & Friends, Glenn Beck, who at the time hosted his own show on Fox, said of President Obama, "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."
Ultimately Beck's conspiracy-driven rhetoric and his belief that his star shined brighter than the network's was too much for even Ailes, who did not renew Beck's contract.
Ailes never fully shed his partisan activities. He counseled President George W. Bush's chief adviser, Karl Rove, during the invasion of Iraq.
In 2012, he personally encouraged New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to run against Obama and sent an emissary to Afghanistan to try to coax Gen. David Petraeus into the race. (That secret mission, carried out by a Fox News national security analyst, was taped.)
Ailes had put many of the candidates in the past few cycles on the Fox payroll; John Kasich and Mike Huckabee used to be Fox News hosts, while Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ben Carson had all been paid Fox News commentators.
Fox News host Megyn Kelly moderates the Republican presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 28.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Above all, Ailes wanted Fox News to referee Republican Party politics.
That backfired, in a sense, last August, when Fox News host Megyn Kelly confronted Donald Trump in the first Republican debate.
Kelly said, "You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals."
Trump interjected, "Only Rosie O'Donnell."
"No, it wasn't," Kelly said.
After the debate, Trump attacked Kelly and Fox News and appeared repeatedly on rival networks, driving up their ratings.
Ailes effectively sued for peace with Trump, alienating Kelly.
The Obsessions Of Roger Ailes
One of Ailes' former executives once told me you just had to watch Fox to understand his obsessions.
The channel was drenched in stories about sex.
Female presenters on Fox were often overtly sexualized. They were steered to wear revealing outfits, while cameras lingered over their legs.
The morning show Fox & Friends, a peppy mix of fraternity humor, gossip and conservative chat, was a particular source of charged banter.
Gretchen Carlson had been a co-host on the show for years. She filed suit earlier this month alleging that Ailes had demoted her to an early afternoon show several years ago, cutting her pay, as a result of her complaints of sexism on the set. He then proceeded to make increasingly plain sexual advances, according to her suit.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appears on Fox & Friends with co-anchors Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade in 2011. Carlson filed suit earlier this month alleging that Ailes had demoted her to an early afternoon show several years ago, cutting her pay, as a result of her complaints of sexism on the set.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
Some anchors and hosts defended Ailes, including some women, in what appeared to be a coordinated effort.
Megyn Kelly, by contrast, held back from public comment and cooperated with an inquiry set up by parent company 21st Century Fox. She reportedly told the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison — which was conducting the inquiry — that Ailes had harassed her, too, when she was a young reporter in the network's Washington bureau. Others have also come forward.
Ailes' management style knit together fierce loyalty and paranoia. Many Fox News journalists have told me of their deep fears of offending Ailes, including one who, like Carlson, says she was sexually harassed by him in recent years.
One way such loyalty can be enforced: Ailes' PR department has peddled negative stories about colleagues who fell out of favor. In one instance, a publicist successfully planted a story in the Washington Post depicting then-anchor Laurie Dhue as drunk at a black-tie affair; after leaving the network, she acknowledged she was an alcoholic. Her lawyer said Thursday she, too, is writing a book about her interactions with Ailes and others at Fox.
Ailes is receiving a severance package in the tens of millions of dollars, though he will remain an adviser to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch will oversee the network in the short term.
Carlson's attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, tells me the payment of such an astonishing sum to get Ailes to resign falls short given all the accusations against him.
Until Carlson's lawsuit, Ailes' charisma, his accomplishments and his stature held sway.
No longer.
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guk obit
roger Ailes was not a good guy. Normally I would steer clear of speaking ill of the dead, but in the case of the founder of Fox News, who died aged 77 on Thursday, I think this represents a “fair and balanced” point of view.
Of course, not everyone shares the same perspective. Rupert Murdoch, who hired Ailes to create Fox in 1996, said in a statement: “He will be remembered by the many people on both sides of the camera that he discovered, nurtured and promoted.” Murdoch diplomatically forget to mention the many women, on both sides of the camera, who Ailes allegedly harassed, exploited and, to use the words of one former Fox News employee, “psychologically tortured”.
Ailes stepped down as the CEO of Fox last July after more than 20 women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment; he will certainly be remembered by all of these women, but for the wrong reasons.
[
Roger Ailes' greatest legacy at Fox News? Donald Trump
:{Read more
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/18/roger-ailes-fox-news-legacy-donald-trump)}:
While Ailes may polarize opinion, there’s one thing that most people can agree on: he made a difference. He played a hugely significant role in creating the nightmare we’re all currently inhabiting. Indeed, in many important ways, the media mogul’s death represents the end of an era.
Ailes’s career neatly spans the rise and fall of broadcast journalism as the most important medium of political influence. A prescient propagandist, Ailes was quick to see the power of television as a tool of political persuasion. In 1970, he was a media adviser to Richard Nixon and prepared “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News”. His strategic shaping of popular opinion got the Republican party on the news, which helped get them in the White House. George Bush (Gulf war Bush, not Iraq war Bush), for example, credited Ailes for making him the 41st president, tweeting: “…Not sure I would have been President w/o his great talent, loyal help. RIP.”
In his 1970 memo, Ailes wrote: “Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: people are lazy. With television you just sit – watch – listen. The thinking is done for you.”
People are still lazy. However, today much of our thinking is done for us by algorithms which serve us up the sort of content we want to see on social media networks, with flagrant disregard for whether that content might be, you know, true. We just sit, skim, share.
The outsized influence of broadcast media as a whole, and Fox News in particular, is on the wane. Indeed, Ailes was representative of the Fox News’s core demographic: old, white, conservative men who are currently dying out. According to Nielsen, 92% of Fox News viewers are white and the median age of the average primetime viewer is 68. That’s five years older than MSNBC viewers, and nine years older than CNN viewers.
A majority of US adults (62%) get news on social media and it has overtaken TV as the main source of news for young people. What’s more, it’s influential: a recent Pew study found 20% of users had “modified their stance on a social or political issue because of material they saw on social media”.
Following the election, there was much debate about the influence of fake news, with many criticizing Facebook for doing nothing to stop its spread. Mark Zuckerberg quickly denied any responsibility, saying: “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook … influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.” You know what else is a crazy idea? A Cheeto as president. But it just happens to be reality.
It’s not just broadcast journalism that is seeing a decline in the power it once took for granted. Spare a quick thought and prayer for the white man, who is slowly going extinct. Earlier this year, John Allan, the chairman of the British supermarket giant Tesco, called white men an “endangered species”, quickly disappearing from powerful positions in business. Who’s booting them out of the boardroom? Pesky women, apparently. Particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds who have it super-easy in today’s world and are handed jobs left and right.
This, um, isn’t exactly borne out in reality – there are still more people called John heading FTSE 100 companies than there are women. However, there’s no doubt that women are dealing sustained blows to the patriarchy. Even the I’m-not-a-feminist women of Fox News, who, after over 30 decades of harassment, decided to fight back and wreak revenge on Roger Ailes.
Ailes’s death marks the end of an era. But it does not necessarily signal the beginning of a more fair and balanced world. Workplace sexual harassment is still rife – with many high-profile cases recently coming out of Silicon Valley. What’s more, we’re only just starting to realize the power of social media to shape our opinions and social media platforms have yet to step up and take proper responsibility.
When it comes to the mass manipulation of political opinion in today’s media landscape, there’s a new Roger Ailes in our midst. His name is probably Mark Zuckerberg.
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ref
no lnx guk
Roger Ailes' greatest legacy at Fox News? Donald Trump
This article is more than 8 years old
Ailes, who died Thursday at the age of 77, left Fox News under a cloud. But his dominance over politics and the media will loom long into Trump’s presidency
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Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington
:{Fri 19 May 2017
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When Roger Ailes resigned from Fox News in July 2016 amid allegations of sexual harassment, he left behind a TV network in turmoil at the height of the US presidential election. But there was no greater validation of Fox’s influence, under Ailes’ tutelage, than the victory of Donald Trump that November.
Ailes, who died on Thursday at the age of 77, became an elusive figure in his final months, roiled by his forced departure from Fox after he was accused of sexually harassing female employees. But his dominance over the political landscape has loomed large throughout Trump’s presidency so far, distinctive in its all-out war against the “mainstream media” and the prominence given to ideologues from the far right.
Roger Ailes with Rupert Murdoch at the launch of Fox News in January 1996. Ailes would go on to become one of the key members of the Murdoch television business.
Roger Ailes career timeline: from trusted Nixon ally to Fox News kingpin
Read more
And Trump’s improbable journey from Manhattan mogul to the Oval Office, media observers say, was made uniquely possibly by the network Ailes transformed over two decades into America’s most-watched cable news channel.
“It’s hard to really overestimate the influence he had on the media and the political landscape,” said Betsy West, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, who was formerly the senior vice-president at CBS News and an executive producer at ABC News.
“In many ways, it’s a straight line to our very polarized news landscape today, where people on either ends of the political spectrum can’t agree on basic facts.”
The resulting conditions laid the groundwork for Trump, who, much like Ailes, challenged the institutions and establishment that had long ruled over Washington.
It was no accident that Trump was handed a microphone by Ailes, who boosted his candidacy by allowing him to phone in weekly to the morning program Fox & Friends. Once Trump secured the Republican nomination, his most frequent appearances were made within the comfort zone of the shows of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity – the latter an ardent supporter of Trump and arguably the most bombastic purveyor of Ailes’ own scorched-earth political mentality.
For Trump, a former reality television star, to find a home on the very network that transformed political news into entertainment was almost an inevitability. It also marked the culmination of Ailes’ double act in politics and the media.
He brought to Fox News this real politically oriented, take-no-prisoners mentality
Kerwin Swint, author
“Roger Ailes was first and foremost a political consultant,” said Kerwin Swint, a professor of politics at Kennesaw State University and author of the book Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox News Founder Roger Ailes.
He had been credited with reshaping the image of Richard Nixon through television to help stage his unlikely 1968 comeback, and went on to advise Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. And then came the idea of a network to fill what he, and, as it would turn out, millions of Americans, saw as a conservative void on cable news.
“He brought to Fox News this real politically oriented, take-no-prisoners mentality to news programming,” said Swing, noting Fox was the first TV network with a clear ideological bent.
“He and Rupert Murdoch believed there was a whole lot of American conservatives out there who didn’t really watch the news, because they thought it was liberal and they wanted something else … It was an untapped market.”
Roger Ailes in the studio. ‘It’s hard to really underestimate the influence he had on the media and the political landscape.’
This upending of the rules of traditional media seemed to presage or play its part in the increasingly bitter polarization of the American electorate. Ailes infused his network with talk-radio personalities such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, using their voices to coalesce the conservative movement behind an us-against-them approach.
“He was unafraid of showcasing voices on the right,” said West. “He hired political commentators who were openly disdainful of the mainstream media.”
The genius, West noted, was in Ailes’ balancing act. Traditional anchors such as Shep Smith, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier enabled Fox to maintain credibility as a news organization.
Roger Ailes allegedly told Alisyn Camerota that a discussion about career opportunities ‘might have to happen at a hotel. Do you know what I’m saying?’
'Roger Ailes did sexually harass me,' says former Fox journalist Alisyn Camerota
Read more
What followed was a blurring of the lines between news and conservative opinion, which to the network’s detractors was a distinction without a difference.
“Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party,” Anita Dunn, Barack Obama’s communications director, said in 2009. The bitter dispute led to a treasury department attempt to exclude Fox from a round of interviews.
It was arguably during the Obama years that the network took its sharpest turn to the right, often fixating its coverage on what it dubbed the president’s war on American values and fanning the flames of conspiracy theories that included Obama’s birthplace.
The leader of the birther movement was none other than Trump, who propagated the false claim that Obama was born in Kenya to launch his political career in the lead-up to the 2012 election. Despite his public flirtation with a presidential run five years ago, Trump ultimately demurred until his infamous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower in July of 2015.
Before formally launching his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Trump met with Ailes over lunch, according to the Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman.
More than anyone of his generation, he helped transform politics into mass entertainment
Gabriel Sherman, Ailes biographer
In his book The Loudest Voice in the Room, published before Trump’s unexpected victory in the November election, Sherman characterized Ailes’ success at Fox in a line that could just as summarily be ascribed to Trump. “More than anyone of his generation, he helped transform politics into mass entertainment,” Sherman wrote of Ailes, “monetizing the politics while making entertainment a potent organizing force.”
By the time Trump came along, the stage was set for his incendiary rhetoric to be dismissed as in keeping with his brash persona and “tell it like it is” attitude. His mockery of a disabled reporter, a historically low moment for anyone seeking public office, was explained away by supporters as merely a joke and by true believers as the product of selective editing.
On the issues, too, Trump’s focus on immigrants and crime mirrored what had often been primetime fodder for Hannity and O’Reilly. Ailes himself possessed hardline views on immigration, with many suggesting his fingerprints could be seen on Trump’s vows to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and launch a deportation force to throw out millions of undocumented immigrants.
Roger Ailes
Alex Gibney confirms documentary about former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes
Read more
“There’s no question there’s tremendous carryover from the Fox News audience base to supporters of Donald Trump,” said Swing. “Trump was able to tap into that eager Fox News consumer that really bought into a lot of the things he said in the campaign.”
There were perhaps few parallels, however, as potent as the two men’s treatment of women.
More than a dozen women accused Trump of sexual harassment in the final weeks leading up to the election, after the 2005 Access Hollywood tape was unearthed in which he bragged about groping and kissing women without their consent. Ailes’ position at his own network became untenable after he was accused by at least 25 women of sexual harassment, including by the Fox News anchors Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly. Both men denied the claims.
Roger Ailes in 2006.
The rumors of Ailes’ abuse had long circulated, but it was not until a New York Times investigation published last year that the flood of women came forward. The allegations fit into the puzzle of Fox’s objectification of women on air, including its use of a camera to zoom in on their legs.
Trump’s misogynistic comments about women had similarly percolated for years, but were viewed in a new light following the tape.
He nonetheless went on to be elected president – due in part to a network that had spent decades attempting to reshape America in its own image.
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Roger Ailes obituary
guk obit
Roger Ailes, who has died aged 77, was arguably the most important shaper of American politics of the past half-century. As a political kingmaker he was crucial to the election of four conservative presidents; as Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager Ed Rollins once said, “he was the premier guy in the business, he was our Michelangelo”. Ailes then used his political savvy to build the Fox News Channel into a kingmaking force, generating huge profits for Fox television and shifting the template of TV journalism.
The man who once told Richard Nixon, “This is not a press conference, it’s a television show,” set the stage for Donald Trump, who absorbed Ailes’ message and approached the presidential campaign as a reality programme. Fox was slow to get behind Trump, but when they did it was with full force. Yet after nearly three decades at the helm of Fox News, in July 2016, weeks before Trump was nominated as the Republican candidate for president, Ailes was forced to resign in the face of an avalanche of sexual harassment accusations from the network’s female stars.
Ailes entered politics after meeting Nixon in 1967, when the latter appeared on the syndicated Mike Douglas talk show in an attempt to burnish his image for a run at the Republican nomination in 1968. Ailes was the young executive producer, and before the show, when Nixon disparaged television as “a gimmick”, Ailes told him if he believed that he would lose the election. By the time they were finished, Nixon had hired Ailes as his media consultant.
:{:{Ailes knew, as the debates with John Kennedy in 1960 had shown, that Nixon was awful on television, so he orchestrated a campaign that relied on small staged live events, before carefully selected friendly audiences, and with pre-arranged questions asked by members of the crowd, not by the press. }:
... to keep the Vietnam war an issue, Nixon followed a “southern strategy” of subtly coded appeals to the formerly Democratic states whose voters resented the civil rights movement. Resentment was an emotion that Ailes cultivated throughout his career, with politicians from Nixon to Sarah Palin playing to what Nixon called “the silent majority”.}:
That was the exact background into which Roger was born, in Warren, Ohio, to Robert Ailes, a maintenance foreman at General Motors’ Packard plant, and his wife Donna (nee Cunningham). Roger suffered from ill-health through much of his childhood, first as a haemophiliac, nearly dying when he bit his tongue, and then needing to relearn how to walk after being hit by a car.
His father threw him out of the family home when he left for Ohio University; Ailes reportedly returned to find his parents gone, having split up, and the house empty.
At college he managed the student radio station and graduated in 1962 with a degree in broadcasting. He got a job as a prop manager on the Douglas show, produced at the Westinghouse Broadcasting station in Cleveland. When the station, and programme, moved to Philadelphia three years later, he was its producer, and two years after that was made executive producer.
However, Ailes made the mistake of being too candid with the journalist Joe McGinniss and, in Nixon’s eyes, taking too much credit for his election in the now classic account of the 1968 campaign, The Selling of the President, published the following year. Nixon fired him, and Ailes went to New York to become a theatre producer. In partnership with Kermit Bloomgarden, he had a hit with Lanford Wilson’s play Hot L Baltimore. He also produced a documentary about Federico Fellini and a live TV special with Liberace from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Nonetheless, he was drawn back to television, and took charge of Television News (TVN), a syndication service funded by far rightwing beer baron Joseph Coors to provide news items promulgating a conservative line that stations could use as if it were their own. Ailes was hired after most of the newsroom had refused to toe the ideological line and been fired. Although the project ended in failure in 1975, Ailes later appropriated the channel’s motto, “fair and balanced”, for Fox News.
After his return to political consulting, Ailes proved crucial when he was brought into Reagan’s campaign for re-election in 1984. His experience as a producer meant that Reagan would take instruction from him, and Ailes convinced him to rely on his image, as well as providing him with ripostes to questions or debating points, such as “quipping” that he would not use the age question against his younger opponent. “Forget facts and figures,” he said, “go on the offensive.”
He took this to an extreme in the 1988 election, when he chose George HW Bush to work with after other potential candidates had approached him. Ailes famously held the cue cards off-camera for Bush when he did a key interview with the CBS reporter Dan Rather, live but in a separate location.
Bush saw off Rather’s attempt to bring up the Iran-Contra scandal by turning the question around to Rather’s having walked off a set in a fit of pique a few weeks earlier.
Ailes also fine-tuned Lee Atwater’s infamous Willie Horton ad, aimed at Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis. Horton was a killer serving a life sentence when he committed robbery and rape while on weekend release from a prison in Massachusetts when Dukakis was governor. Ailes took Horton out of the ad, instead concentrating on a “revolving door” through which prisoners, one of whom looked like Horton, black with a large Afro, passed in and out.
In a book he wrote with Jon Kraushar, You Are the Message: Secrets of Master Communicators (1987), Ailes sought to convince readers that they, not the television, were actually making decisions. But an attempt to replay the Horton theme failed for Ailes in Rudy Giuliani’s 1989 attempt to unseat New York’s black mayor David Dinkins, after Dinkins branded Ailes a “master of mud”.
In 1991 Ailes announced his withdrawal from political consulting after his candidate, Richard Thornburgh, a former attorney general for Reagan and Bush, lost a race for the Senate in Pennsylvania. “I quit politics because I hated it,” he said, but like Nixon he was unable to keep his word to stay away. Instead he approached the business from the other side.
Roger Ailes interviewed by Peter Robinson in 2010 in the Hoover Institution’s web series Uncommon Knowledge
While working for big tobacco to stop Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform, Ailes also began producing a syndicated TV show for the radio “shock-jock” Rush Limbaugh, which became a hit. He took over the failing CNBC business channel, tripled its profits and made stars of the combative host Chris Matthews and stunning business reporter Maria Bartiromo, setting a formula he followed at Fox: men apparently chosen for bombast and women for looks. But when a second channel he started for NBC, called America Talks, was taken from him and turned into MSNBC, Ailes left the network in 1996 and teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News.
If his on-air formula had been honed at MSNBC, it was perfected at Fox. Every programme, whether news bulletin, opinion or talk show, stayed on message, keeping to the same talking points, reinforcing them throughout the news cycle. Panels were weighted toward the in-house viewpoint; any token “liberal”, like Sean Hannity’s sparring partner Alan Colmes, was browbeaten, talked over and dismissed. Fox’s perceived antipathy towards black people, gay people or Muslims apparently echoed Ailes’ own attitudes, and he insisted on bullet-proof cars and office windows to protect him from angry minorities.
Fox’s impact reached its apotheosis with the 2000 election of George W Bush. It was Fox that first “called” Florida, and thus the election, for Bush. Ailes’ “decision desk”, which acted before any projections had indicated victory, was headed by John Prescott Ellis, Bush’s first cousin, whom Fox had hired after he left his job at the Boston Globe because he could not be impartial. Ailes later commented: “Fox would not be prejudiced in hiring just because of someone’s relations.” After Ellis’s call, the other networks panicked to follow suit. Bush was thus established as “the winner”, from whom victory would have to be stolen.
Ailes moved from strength to strength in the Bush years. Lachlan Murdoch left his position as head of Fox Television Stations in 2005, allegedly because his father Rupert sided with Ailes in a dispute, and Ailes took over. Fox News grew even stronger in opposition to Barack Obama. The subtle race card, first played on Nixon’s behalf in 1968, was played with less subtlety throughout two presidencies, and the slipshod Tea Party movement achieved respectability and power with Fox’s support. Defeated Republicans from Palin to Rick Santorum found profitable pulpits, and Fox became the unofficial home of the official opposition.
However, Ailes’ empire crumbled following a sexual harassment lawsuit brought last July by the news anchor Gretchen Carlson, a former Miss America who alleged she had been demoted when she complained about colleagues’ treatment of her. She proceeded to record Ailes’ conversations with her, full of sexual propositions offering rewards.
Gabriel Sherman, author of a 2014 biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, which had reported numerous incidents that Ailes had denied, produced six more women who backed up Carlson’s claims with more of their own. When Megyn Kelly, Fox’s biggest female star, was asked to go public to support Ailes, she refused, instead revealing that she too had suffered similar harassment. Although Ruper Murdoch allegedly wanted to wait until after the Republican convention, Lachlan and his brother James convinced him to get Ailes to go immediately, with a $40m payoff.
Ailes kept a low profile, but reportedly advised Trump behind the scenes during his presidential campaign. He died from bleeding on the brain after an accidental fall.
His first two marriages, to Marjorie White and Norma Ferrer, ended in divorce. In 1998 he married Elizabeth Tilson, who survives him, with their son, Zachary.
Roger Eugene Ailes, television executive and political consultant, born 15 May 1940; died 18 May 2017
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2x
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no lnx
About Ailes, Nixon, and That Snake …
By Gabriel Sherman
Jan. 10, 2014
:{:{During an interview today on CBS This Morning, I discussed with hosts Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell the moment Roger Ailes met Richard Nixon on the set of The Mike Douglas Show in January, 1968. At the time, Ailes was the show’s 27-year-old executive producer, and Nixon was there to be interviewed as he ramped up his presidential campaign. CBS This Morning opened the segment with a clip of Ailes recounting his version of the encounter in an earlier interview with Rose on his PBS show.}:
Ailes said he spoke to Nixon about his campaign because he had booked him on the same day as a belly dancer and, wanting to spare Nixon an awkward encounter, let him wait in his office until the interview started. It is a story he has told in many interviews and speeches. “The guests were Richard Nixon and a dancer called Little Egypt — with her boa constrictor,” he told the New York Times in 2001. “I didn’t wanna scare Nixon and I didn’t wanna scare the snake, so I stuck Nixon in my office for 15 minutes. If I’d put Little Egypt in there, I’d be managing belly dancers right now.”}:
:{:{The story is a masterful bit of myth-making by Roger Ailes that downplays his early ambition to amass political power. He casts himself as a wunderkind producer who by a fluke stumbled into Republican politics. But, according to several of Ailes’s Mike Douglas colleagues who were present, there was no belly dancer named Little Egypt booked that day. Their assertion is backed up by the show’s talent logs, which I viewed.}:
The guests during the Nixon taping, which took place on January 9, were the singer Margaret Whiting, the actress Stella Stevens, the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, and Tony Sandler’s children. According to the talent log for that week’s shoots, the dance duo John Brascia and Tybee Arfa had been scheduled to come into the studio when Nixon was there, but were bumped back a day. Tybee, as she was known, was certainly exotic. But she never performed under the name Little Egypt. And the snake? “No one has any recollection of Tybee ever dancing with a boa,” recalled John Brascia’s daughter, Christina. }:
:{:{Mike Douglas later told an interviewer it was his idea to have Nixon wait in Ailes’s office, and because Ailes wanted to get into politics, he seized the opportunity to have a private conversation with Nixon. “He wanted so to get into that area,” Douglas told an interviewer. Producer Kenny Johnson was standing in the hallway and saw Ailes enter his office with Nixon and shut the door. The meeting lasted an hour. Afterwards, Johnson saw Ailes emerge shaking his head and flashing a raffish grin. “I may have just shot myself in the foot or gotten myself another job,” Ailes told Johnson. Kenny Johnson recalled to me a conversation he had in Ailes’s office around that time about the power of propaganda.}:
Like Ailes, Johnson loved the theater. He had performed in high school plays and studied directing at Carnegie Tech, where he had become fascinated by the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, especially Triumph of the Will and Olympia. “I was blown away,” Johnson remembered. “I had an enormous hatred of Hitler, but when I saw Triumph of the Will, you find yourself thinking, ‘Wow, he’s pretty cool — no, wait, I hate these guys.’” Ailes told Johnson that he too was a big fan of Riefenstahl. “He thought her work was brilliant,” Johnson said. They talked about “how she made different versions of the films for different countries not only to aggrandize the Nazis but to throw a bone to the other folks.” Ailes was especially taken by Riefenstahl’s use of camera angles. “There’s so many subtle things you see in propaganda,” Johnson said. “If you put the camera below a subject’s eye height, it’s the ‘hero shot.’ It gives him dominance. We talked about the psychological impact of the placement of the camera.”}:
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much as the Republican Party’s nomination of Donald Trump as president this week, the demise of Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes marks the end of an age.
Toppled by a cascade of sexual harassment charges and said to be nearing the exits at Fox, Ailes will be remembered for undermining the dominant 20th-century model of objective journalism with his defiantly right-wing news channel. But he was equally important in transforming politics itself. Not only did he tutor presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in the ways of media politics, but he was largely responsible for two of the signal changes in American political culture since the 1960s: the rise of television as a national force and the emergence of cultural populism as a key feature of the Republican Party.
In fact, apart from the presidents he served, he was arguably the single most important figure in the creation of modern conservatism. By fusing television’s power to conjure feelings of anger and resentment to an ideology of cultural populism that demonized liberal elites, Ailes set forth the methods and the message that would help conservative politicians win and maintain power for decades. That is, until Trump, who, this week in Cleveland, officially closed his hostile takeover of the party that Ailes helped build, using the very tactics Ailes had pioneered.
Ailes—whose story is best told in Gabriel Sherman’s invaluable biography The Loudest Voice in the Room—saw the importance of television as a political tool early in his career. He burst onto the political scene as a twentysomething adviser to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. It was a job he earned after offering the candidate some frank and canny advice about TV on the set of The Mike Douglas Show, where Ailes was a producer. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes brashly chided Nixon, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”
Nixon’s success in the 1968 election launched the young Ailes into national politics. Although he didn’t officially join the White House—senior aides like H.R. Haldeman didn’t want Ailes to have the president’s ear—he continued to advise Nixon on television and media strategy. He supervised TV moments like the president’s introduction of Warren Burger as his nominee to the Supreme Court and his call to Neil Armstrong after he walked on the moon. Ailes also encouraged Nixon to practice the politics of resentment that came naturally to him, creating the basic formula used by Reagan, both Bushes and countless lesser conservative politicians: playing on the public’s sense that powerful liberal were getting ahead at the expense of Middle America.
Along with others in the Nixon White House, Ailes also began to change how the public thought about the press, arguing relentlessly that what we now call the mainstream media had an irredeemable liberal bias. From Vice President Spiro Agnew’s fiery speeches in late 1969 to the ongoing White House project of monitoring news coverage for ideological taint, Nixon’s team helped sow the notion that conservative politicians and viewpoints weren’t getting a fair shake in the news coverage—and used the resulting public support this generated as leverage against the press. Ailes fully shared this opinion of the media as slanted. In a memo to top Nixon aides, he even proposed creating a White House television news service that would provide local stations with administration-produced news segments to counterbalance what viewers consumed via regular TV.
Across the country, meanwhile, the political consulting business was catching on—and here, too, Ailes was a pioneer. Candidates for state or national office were coming to depend on a new breed of media wizards, who knew how to cut television ads, build mailing lists and develop lines of attack. Ailes himself began a consulting practice, and after the publication of Joe McGinniss’ Selling of the President 1968—which told the story of Nixon’s media operation in the campaign, with the colorful Ailes in a starring role—that practice took off.
In these pre-internet, pre-cable-news years, candidates and politicians were learning to wage their message wars largely through network television. They crafted emotionally powerful campaign ads and devised clever strategies to win favorable nightly news coverage. An emerging wisdom held that television watchers absorbed their knowledge about public affairs at a gut level, more visceral than newspaper readers, making them especially susceptible to emotional appeals, particularly of the conservative kind.
:{:{:{Partial to these theories, Ailes for the next two decades advocated using the media to draw over to the GOP disaffected Democrats and alienated independents, who were growing in number as the parties themselves weakened. To reach these members of what Nixon called “the Silent Majority,” Ailes and the politicians he advised relied on the cultural populism that was moving closer and closer to the center of conservative ideologyy. Ads and other forms of messaging would emphasize how spineless or elitists liberal politicians were betraying these voters on a host of values-laden issues—often racially charged ones—including crime, drugs, busing, welfare, affirmative action and national security.}:
Ailes also continued to pursue correctives to what he saw as media bias. In the early 1970s, he went to work for a conservative news network called Television News Incorporated, funded by the right-wing beer king Joseph Coors. Like Ailes’ proposed Nixon project, TVN hoped to feed its own right-leaning news segments into the broadcasts that ran on local stations nationwide. (It even used the current Fox slogan, “fair and balanced.”) Ailes hoped to build TVN into a full-fledged network to rival the broadcast giants, but it lost money and folded in 1975. While keeping a hand in other projects, Ailes committed himself to Republican politics.
:{:{The pinnacle of Ailes’ direct political influence came in the 1988 campaign of Vice President George Bush. When the race began, the blue-blooded high-WASP Bush was widely seen as Reagan’s pale imitator. His campaign needed, as Newsweek put it in a cover line, to dispel “the wimp factor.” Warming to the challenge, Ailes, serving as Bush’s media adviser and unofficial strategist, injected anger and fight into Bush’s message and persona by prodding the candidate to go on the attack.}:
After a weak showing in the Iowa caucuses, the effete Bush viciously assailed his main rival, Bob Dole, in the ensuing primaries, and in the fall he shamelessly smeared the cerebral Michael Dukakis, painting the Democratic nominee as soft on crime, unpatriotic and even un-American. An Ailes protégé, Larry McCarthy, developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that highlighted the case of a black inmate furloughed from prison in Massachusetts on a Dukakis-approved plan who proceeded to rape a Maryland woman and assault her husband. Ultimately, Bush overcame a 17-point deficit in the polls to win the election in November by a substantial margin.}:
After the election, Ailes remained an important adviser to Bush. Crucially, in the weeks before the first Gulf War, Ailes convened focus groups to test which messages would most effectively make the case for using military force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. A memo from Ailes to the president delineated those arguments that worked and those that didn’t, allowing Bush to refine his argument for his televised Oval Office address. In 1992, while assuming no formal position in the reelection campaign, Ailes persuaded Bush to deride Bill Clinton’s patriotism, which the president did by making baseless insinuations about a trip Clinton had taken as a young man to Russia.
Increasingly, however, Ailes—having reached the crest of presidential politics—turned his attentions to the extra-governmental right-wing message machine. He retained his longtime dream of creating an outlet that would provide a conservative alternative to the mainstream media. Early on, he appreciated the emotive power and influence of talk radio, including rising stars like Rush Limbaugh. In 1992, Ailes created and produced a TV show for Limbaugh—it ran until 1996—and he introduced the celebrity radio host to President Bush, who in an effort to shore up his bona fides with the far right invited the two men for a night in the White House. (Bush literally carried Limbaugh’s bags, to much ridicule.)
:{Limbaugh and a bevy of similar radio and TV hosts operated very much in the Ailesian vein: militant in their ideology, aggrieved in their attitudes, provocative in their rhetoric. :{Collectively, they began prodding not just liberals but also the GOP establishment, urging them to adopt increasingly extreme stands while also forcing workaday journalists to give respectful attention to far-right arguments that once would have been deemed beyond the pale}:.
Taking these voices and methods from radio to television, Ailes hoped, would not only be a lucrative business prospect but also held the potential to enhance conservative power regardless of who held the White House.}:
As cable TV grew, Ailes found employment there. He led CNBC for a while, and under NBC’s auspices ran a short-lived network called “America’s Talking,” which tried to bring talk-radio politics to television. But when NBC folded that ill-conceived network to create a new news channel, MSNBC, Ailes chose to join forces with the conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch to create the Fox News Channel, his greatest legacy.
While many news stories focused on Murdoch’s influence, Ailes was always the visionary and guiding hand behind their network. Debuting in 1996, Fox by 2002 had overtaken CNN as the most-watched cable news network. Its key role in defining and promulgating right-wing issues and talking points over the last two presidential administrations—always in the vein of angry, resentful politics that Nixon made central to the modern Republican Party—is today well established. (Despite his role running Fox, Ailes continued to advise Republicans closely, whether dispensing advice to George W. Bush, about the politics of his war on terrorism or coaching vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan in the 2012 campaign.)
:{:{Ailes’ success, politically and commercially, emboldened him. The elevation to stardom of Megyn Kelly, as Jim Rutenberg wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 2015, seemed to herald a hubristic attempt to expand Fox’s viewership beyond the conservative diehards that had made it prosper. Kelly made her name by embarrassing Karl Rove on election night 2012, when he insisted, against the evidence, that Mitt Romney might yet win Ohio and that calling the election for Barack Obama was premature.}:
Later, Kelly surprised Dick Cheney by telling him, “History has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” Her willingness to confront Donald Trump over his record of sexist rhetoric in last summer’s Republican debate launched her to new heights of fame, embodying Fox’s bid for broader respectability while also—perhaps paradoxically—highlighting the tension between the real-estate mogul’s assaults on the GOP establishment and the network’s fidelity to the ideological dogmas at the party’s heart.}:
Tellingly, it was apparently when Kelly turned on Ailes this week that his fate was sealed. By informing investigators that he had sexually harassed her some years ago, adding to a lengthening list of female employees with similar stories, she helped to persuade Murdoch to oust the man who built Murdoch’s most lucrative media property. Given changing attitudes about women and sex, the macho and often anti-feminist conservative populism in which Ailes believed so deeply had become increasingly hard to tolerate or justify. The women accusing Ailes aren’t, for the most part, liberal, but their charges are made possible by the triumph of liberal ideas on gender equality.
It’s fitting, too, that Ailes’ demise should come about as Trump assumes leadership of the Republican Party. It was Trump, after all, who proved that Ailes and Fox were not omnipotent in the world of conservative politics. He not only won the GOP nomination with ideologically heterodox positions, at least at selected moments, on trade, Vladimir Putin, the Iraq War, gay rights, taxes on the rich, Social Security and Planned Parenthood; he also openly warred with Fox throughout the primary season—promising, fleetingly, not to go on the network when it treated him unfairly—and if he lost that battle, he won the war.
There’s another irony as well. If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day: the substitution of bluster for reason, the angry scapegoating of others, the blind hatred and exaggerated fear of liberals in power, the appeal to traditional conservative values on polarizing social issues. Trump has merely upped the ante.
And where Ailes used Fox News to fulfill his longstanding goal of circumventing the mainstream news outlets, Trump used his own celebrity to circumvent the rules of television altogether—gaining free media by capitalizing on the endless appetite for debate, argument and talk that Ailes had done so much to popularize.
In a way, Donald Trump beat Roger Ailes at his own game. Like so many other revolutions, the conservative revolution now eats its own.
1971 talk
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Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina and current lieutenant governor, is in trouble again.
Not just because Robinson has referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and a “perv,” expressed support for reinstating slavery, said he watched transgender pornography, called homosexuality “filth” and the Holocaust “hogwash,” and has asserted that “some folks need killing.”
He’s in trouble now because he blew off a vote on a declaration that would have granted Governor Roy Cooper key emergency powers ahead of Hurricane Helene’s landfall. Robinson was the only member on the Council of State — a board of nine — who didn’t vote in favor of the declaration. Cooper got the power he needed, but Robinson is now criticizing him for not doing more in the wake of the storm.
Yet Robinson still commands the support of 63 percent of Republicans in North Carolina, according to an East Carolina University poll released Wednesday.
Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.
The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.
It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.
The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich saw an opportunity to build the Republican Party around similar lies and conspiracy theories. Gingrich’s efforts attracted the first group of modern crackpot candidates into the GOP.
Starting in 2016, Trump attracted another group, even wackier than the previous one.
It’s become a doom loop. As both the demand and the supply of these lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and racism have grown, the Republican Party’s base has ventured farther from reality. Meanwhile, sane Republicans have left, reasonable people have drifted away, and normal Republican officials have been purged or voted out.
If Trump loses the 2024 election, the Republican Party won’t change, because its base is filled with this poison. So it will continue to attract more crackpot candidates loaded with even more venom; it will nominate them, and some of them will win.
In the current election cycle, the poison doesn’t begin or end with Trump. It includes a Republican vice presidential candidate who calls women who choose not to have children “childless cat ladies,” claims Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, won’t concede that Trump lost the 2020 election, and won’t commit to be bound by the outcome of the 2024 election.
It’s produced a slew of Republican candidates for Congress saying similar things. In Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown’s Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, is parroting the same racist lies about Haitian immigrants.
In Arizona, the Republican candidate for Senate, Kari Lake, has denied the outcome of the 2020 election, tried to overturn the governor’s race she lost in 2022, appeared at QAnon and white nationalist-tied events, and has a history of violent rhetoric.
Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia has called abortion “elective surgery” and compared it to a “Hollywood nose job.”
Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who was at Trump’s January 6 rally and appears to have been among the insurrectionists who breached police barricades at the Capitol, calls abortion “genocide.”
Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane is promoting conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump — blaming a mole within Trump’s Secret Service detail and saying that the FBI can’t be trusted to “give us the truth”; that the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, didn’t act alone; and that the gunman behind the second attempt is an “asset” of a foreign adversary — despite evidence contradicting all these theories.
Back in North Carolina, Michele Morrow, the current Republican candidate for superintendent of public instruction, has been warning voters about a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that, she says, torture and kill children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.
Morrow says the plus sign in LGBTQ+ “includes PEDOPH*L*A!!” She claims that transgender therapy is “a disgusting plan of Big Pharma to make our children unable to reproduce” and that the World Health Organization has been using vaccines to sterilize people and kill children. She says Satan is “in cahoots” with Democrats, globalists, the “one world order,” the United Nations, China, and Russia “to take down the United States of America.”
Morrow discourages parents from sending their kids to public schools, which she refers to as “indoctrination centers” and “socialism centers.” She was on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, and proposed then that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, which, she said, “completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, ‘Now the military rules all.’”
Despite all this, Morrow has an even chance to become the state’s top educator. A poll by Raleigh-based WRAL last month found that she is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent.
You see the problem. When the base of one of our two political parties both fuels and is fueled by crackpots, some of those crackpots get elected.
The only way forward is with an entirely new Republican Party that rejects and detoxifies the old one and puts an end to this doom loop. Will Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and some as yet unknown young politicians lead the way?
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9 24 the lever podcast series
trailer: Master Plan | Listen Now
ep 4
3 mtg orlando dallas and --- same time? jerry ford vp
white of US steel
devos amway pal, joe coors/ AILES
In this episode, we definitely answer that question for the very first time. Master Plan lead producer Jared Jacang Maher has uncovered troves of never-before-reported evidence that proves corporate executives and politicians didn’t just read Powell’s memo — they acted on it.
This includes three secret meetings of a “Powell Memo Task Force” — including one at Disney World. These gatherings drew together America’s most powerful businessmen, a future president, and an ambitious young media consultant named Roger Ailes.
By the end of 1974, the Powell Memo had transformed from a set of ideas into an actual master plan — and the pieces were in place to carry out a decades-long assault on American democracy.
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fox News’ Brian Kilmeade acknowledged on Thursday that federal regulations may be necessary to protect people and the environment, a rare admission on a network that has pushed for mass deregulation for decades. Kilmeade, who co-hosts Fox & Friends, made the comments while discussing the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and its aftermath.
“I knew nothing about these derailment numbers,” Kilmeade said. “I'm stunned by it – that we have thousands of derailments all the time and how costly it is, and how they're not kept up and maybe the regulation needs to be there"
fox News has long vilified federal regulations as governmental overreach, and needless red tape that eats into corporate profits.In 2011, the network launched Regulation Nation, a series that would “expose how excessive laws are drowning American businesses.” The series was the brainchild of then-Fox News President Roger Ailes, who said at the time that bureaucrats “draw up regulations to try to ruin your life.” [vid]
That same year, Fox News also waged a full-on war against the Environmental Protection Agency, and continues to argue against environmental regulations, including in its so-called straight news programs.
More recently, Fox News personalities and their guests have railed against federal regulations for the oil industry, argued that federal regulations are a way to divide families, blamed regulations that purport to limit police violence for resulting in the police killing of Tyre Nichols, and pushed for further deregulation of the cryptocurrency market, just to name a few examples. Fox News and other cable networks also largely ignored the Trump administration’s broad deregulatory agenda to benefit massive polluters in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Television coverage of East Palestine was scant and decontextualized, including on Fox News, immediately after the derailment, with only 3% of coverage mentioning the decadeslong deregulatory push by the rail industry. The Obama administration attempted to make more effective train brakes mandatory following a series of derailments in 2014, which the industry fought against, effectively hollowing out the proposed rules. In 2018, the Trump administration completely repealed the regulations.
related
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-host-ohio-train-derailment-regulations-regarding-train-safety-were-changed-during
{{ hannity history
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ggl 4 25 2016 election
Sean Hannity}:
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Sean_Hannity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Hannity)
Sean Patrick Hannity (born December 30, 1961) is an American conservative television presenter, broadcaster and writer. He hosts The Sean Hannity Show, ...
The Sean Hannity Show · Hannity & Colmes · Ainsley Earhardt · Alan Colmes
[### Sean Hannity: I'm not Donald Trump's foil
Politico
https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/04 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/sean-hannity-donald-trump-221923)
Apr 13, 2016 — Sean Hannity wants to make one thing clear: He's not propping up Donald Trump. The conservative media host shot down a recent ThinkProgress story.
[### Hannity apparently asked what to say on Election Day. ...
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2022/04/25](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/25/hannity-apparently-asked-what-say-election-day-then-he-said-it/)
Apr 25, 2022 — ... Fox News host Sean Hannity on the day of the 2020 election. ... Hannity had endorsed Trump before the 2016 election, an odd act for ...
[### Has Sean Hannity's Trump support crossed the line?
The Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com › USA › Politics › 2016](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/0921/Has-Sean-Hannity-s-Trump-support-crossed-the-line)
Sep 23, 2016 — Conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has been a vocal supporter of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, but critics, ...
[### Sean Hannity cites misleading Obama quote in coverage ...
PolitiFact
https://www.politifact.com › factchecks › jul › sean-han...](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jul/17/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-cites-misleading-obama-quote-coverage/)
Claim: "In 2016, when Hillary Clinton appeared to have a firm lead in the polls — oh, just before the election, it was President Obama who laughed off any notion...
Claimed by: Sean Hannity
Fact check by PolitiFact: Mostly False
[### Hannity: I'm voting for Trump
Politico
https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/06 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/sean-hannity-supports-trump-223763)
Jun 1, 2016 — Donald Trump on Tuesday sat down for an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, who made his support of Trump explicit.
[### US election 2016 daily briefing: Fox News stars in feud ...
BBC
https://www.bbc.com › election-us-2016-37570387](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37570387)
Oct 6, 2016 — Two of the conservative news channel's biggest stars have turned their sharp tongues on one another after Sean Hannity accused Megyn Kelly of being in league ...
[### Trump and Sean Hannity Promote Ukraine-Clinton Theory
Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com › donald-trump-sean-hanni...](https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-sean-hannity-theory-ukraine-colluded-hillary-clinton-1376867)
Mar 27, 2019 — How Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Are Promoting Theory Ukraine Interfered in 2016 Election to Help Hillary Clinton. Published Mar 27, 2019 at ...
[### Sean Hannity campaigns on stage at Trump's Missouri rally ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2018/11/06 › media › trump-ral...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/media/trump-rally-missouri-hannity/index.html)
Nov 6, 2018 — Sean Hannity defied his own words on Monday, appearing on stage at President Donald Trump's final election rally after having said he ...
[### How Sean Hannity Became Influential In Conservative ...
Texas Public Radio | TPR
https://www.tpr.org › 2016-12-19 › how-sean-hannity-...](https://www.tpr.org/2016-12-19/how-sean-hannity-became-influential-in-conservative-media-and-politics)
Dec 19, 2016 — Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News show “Hannity” and a syndicated talk radio show, helped rally conservative support for Donald Trump.
How Sean Hannity Became Influential In Conservative Media And Politics
During the presidential campaign, Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News show “Hannity” and a syndicated talk radio show, helped rally conservative support for Donald Trump. That trend will most likely continue throughout the Trump presidency.
But how did Hannity become so influential in conservative media and Republican politics? Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Brian Rosenwald ( @brianros1), a media historian and fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who is writing a book about the rise of talk radio and its influence on public policy.
Interview Highlights
On Hannity’s talk radio background
“One thing that people sometimes forget in the political world is, TV might be sexier, but radio can often reach more listeners, and the audiences are intensely loyal. And Sean Hannity, his background is radio. Before he was doing TV, he was doing radio in Huntsville, Alabama, in Atlanta, Georgia, and a lot of these guys who do both will tell you they like radio more, they reach more people, they have more time, they like the medium better.
:{:{“He started out, he actually flopped on a college radio station in Santa Barbara, that was way to the left, where he went out there after he dropped out of college, and he admittedly says, ‘Look, I was terrible.’ And then he ended up starting his rise in Huntsville, Alabama, and he migrated to Atlanta, and he was doing morning drive on a talk station down there, and then he did some TV work, and Roger Ailes discovered him. And he comes to New York to do ‘Hannity & Colmes,’ and joins the powerhouse station on WABC.}:
And he’s there for a few years, and they decide in 2001… they’re looking for syndicated stars, especially conservative ones. ABC Radio decided to syndicate Hannity, and they have him set up to go in a bunch of major markets, and he has the, sort of, fortune to have his national debut be Sept. 10, 2001. And obviously the next day, sort of changes the face of the country, and the ratings for talk radio across the board skyrocket — people want to talk about it, they want to hear what other people are saying, it becomes kind of a virtual community, and people who had never heard Sean Hannity start to hear him, they like what they’re hearing, and he sort of goes from there to become the No. 2 guy in talk radio.”}:
Array
On Hannity’s relationship with his radio listeners
“I’ve heard callers say, ‘Thank God you’re out there Sean, we have a voice now.’ There are some people who spend more time with their favorite talk radio host than they do with their spouses. People who were driving a truck all day, or out on a tractor, or doing some other job where they can listen three hours a day, five days a week, 48, 50 weeks a year, to the same person, they feel like they get to know that person, and that person reflects their views. And then in a lot of cases, for conservatives, that person punches back at people who they feel like are maligning them and scorning them and mistreating them.”
On Hannity’s impact on the 2016 presidential election
“I think that, in the primary election, had people like Sean Hannity really been hardcore against Donald Trump, from day one — we’re going back to 2015 here — they might have been able to knock him off in the primary. In terms of a general election, people were bombarded on all sides with information, and usually, I don’t think talk radio has a huge influence in presidential general elections for that reason, but in this case, insomuch as the key to the election, or one of the keys, was getting conservatives who had misgivings about either Trump’s morals or his qualifications, or some of what he said, or some of the policies he supported, to go out and vote for him.
“I think talk radio’s kind of drumbeat of, ‘Hillary is worse,’ and attacking her and keeping her emails front and center from day one for a year and a half, that helped drive those conservatives with misgivings back onto the reservation, and this is what Hannity and other talk radio hosts do at election time, which is, they frame tings in such a way, and they keep their audience kind of understanding the stakes, and why Republicans — whatever misgivings you might have — Republicans are still the best way to go.”
2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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Fox News have a competitor in the near future? Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel is reportedly eyeing the possibility of creating a conservative cable news network,BuzzFeed reports — and the billionaire’s representatives have allegedly recruited the Trump-allied Mercer family to assist with funding.
The information was reportedly given to BuzzFeed by “two sources familiar with the situation.”
According to the report, the prospect of a right-wing cable news network has been on Thiel’s mind for quite some time. He is alleged to have had talks withRoger Ailes, the former CEO of Fox News, before Ailes' death in May 2017 — a tidbit of information that came from Michael Wolff's upcoming book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House."
Wolff's book claims both Ailes and Thiel were concerned that “Trump could bring Trumpism down.” The two were planning to meet in May, according to BuzzFeed's account, but Ailes passed away before the meeting happened. BuzzFeed says that the book suggests that had Ailes not died, right-wing commentators Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity could have been part of the network, too.
Neither Thiel nor Ailes’ late wife, Elizabeth, commented on the BuzzFeed News report.
If true, the prospect of a news network would be an interesting move for Thiel, who has had his own quarrels with the media. The Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor — who has publicly supported Trump, and spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016 — financed Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, helping to purposely bankrupt the online magazine.
Thiel had a personal vendetta against Gawker, but denied that he wished to get revenge on the magazine for negative publicity. “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview about the lawsuit. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”
Of particular interest is the Mercer family’s supposed involvement. Robert Mercer, a hedge fund tycoon, was one of Trump’s top campaign donors. After it was revealed that Robert Mercer had helped fund right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart News, Mercer stepped down as CEO of his firm and disputed claims that he supported Yiannopoulos's views.
“Actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate,” Mercer wrote in an open letter. “I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.”
Mercer reportedly also removed himself from his connections with Breitbart and Steve Bannon at this time too, according to the New York Times.
Yet would a right-wing cable news network run by Thiel and Mercer be that different from Fox News? It's tough to say.
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aha-let: trump says usa is broken and the system is rigged (ripped off bernie?) then offers hims self as the only strong man who can fix it (to those who feel economically and politically dis-em POWERED, this might seem like a good bet, esp if BS braINWASHED by govt is bad, free mkt will fix all bs? he then breaks system more, undermines norms/moderation, makes a mess tha makes ppl more desperate and disillusioned? death spiral?
naomi klein said several factors lines up in right way at same time to torpedo climate action at the inflection pt that we needed to act?
https://theconversation.com/trump-the-transgressor-the-psychological-appeal-of-leaders-who-break-the-rules-130247
Many of today’s politicians appear to appeal to the basic human need for safety, presenting their versions of strong leadership as the best hope for order and safety in a fearful world of growing instability and risk. Much evidence confirms that this appeal is certainly an important factor in the political landscape.
But alongside this, other psychological dynamics are currently influential in a number of Western democracies – particularly in attracting people to support populist leaders and their agendas.
One of these – which is of particular relevance to the impeachment trial of the US president, Donald Trump – concerns the pleasure and excitement that some citizens appear to find in a leader who breaks rules and ignores taboos. These transgressions can come in various forms, such as controversial statements, unconventional lifestyles or disrespectful approaches to the political process. But they can also extend to improper activities and abuse of power – such as those detailed in the impeachment charges against Trump – or anti-democratic activity and violence.
Rule breakers
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new
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https://cpj.org/blog/2018/02/weinstein-blackcube-surveillance-claim-exposes-agg.php
Weinstein-BlackCube surveillance claim exposes aggressive tactics to kill a story
By Avi Asher-Schapiro/CPJ US Correspondent on February 7, 2018
Those with deep pockets can go to great lengths to push back against journalism they find objectionable. Billionaire Peter Thiel deployed a team of lawyers in a move that bankrupted the news site Gawker in 2016--and last month President Donald Trump's lawyers tried to block the publication of an unflattering book. But there's another, much less public, arena where the wealthy can combat unflattering reporting: the world of subterfuge-for-hire, where private investigators work to undermine a story before it's even made public.
In late 2017, the public was privy to a rare glimpse inside this world. Ronan Farrow, in a New Yorker exposé, reported that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner had enlisted a team of private investigators to push back against reporting into dozens of sexual assault and rape allegations against their client. One of the private investigation firms, BlackCube--an outfit staffed with former agents of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad--was ordered in a contract obtained by The New Yorker to "completely stop the publication" of an article critical of Weinstein. BlackCube ultimately failed. But, Farrow's report found, journalists investigating Weinstein at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York magazine, and their sources, were approached by undercover agents with fabricated backstories, as part of an elaborate effort to keep Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct secret.
Weinstein's spokespeople have denied the allegations against him and rejected claims that he tried to "suppress" any journalism. BlackCube has repeatedly insisted that it "applies high moral standards" to all of its work, and in an interview a member of its advisory board expressed regret for its relationship with Weinstein.
While there are no laws against lying to a reporter or their sources, or conducting public surveillance of or pushing embarrassing information about a journalist--as long as that behavior doesn't veer into libel or slander--the Weinstein story raised questions about how far some will go to kill a negative story--and what, if any, ethical and legal guardrails exist to protect journalists
Of course, the use of underhanded tactics to derail a reporter is nothing new. Bethany McLean, a business reporter who broke the Enron story in 2001, recalls receiving multiple phone calls from individuals who said they were potential sources. These calls, she told CPJ, amounted to sloppy sting operations: those on the other line would try to lure her into admitting she wanted to financially benefit from her own reporting--McLean said she assumed she was being taped.
For most reporters, however, pushback usually comes in the form of aggressive public relations firms or, on occasion, threatening letters from their subjects' lawyers. Weathering an undercover operation has not typically been part of a journalists' job description. George Freeman said that in nearly 30 years as a lawyer for The New York Times, he "can barely think of an example" of these tactics. He is now executive director of the independent advisory group the Media Law Resource Center. "Unfortunately, it's becoming less rare in the last couple years," he told CPJ. "And that's what's scary about it"
Subjects of journalistic scrutiny are, of course, entitled to defend themselves. And for those with the resources to do so, there are plenty of techniques that reporters with whom CPJ spoke said they have come to expect, including compiling publicly available information that could reveal a reporter's conflicts of interest, or a dossier of past reporting mistakes.
The Weinstein story revealed a more aggressive toolbox apparently used by private investigators: the impersonation of sources and hiring reporters as agents. Other cases involve deploying aggressive surveillance, and smearing sources or reporters by spreading potentially damaging personal information.
Before Weinstein, another high-profile case alleging attempts to suppress reporting focused on Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News. Ailes' biographer Gabriel Sherman, citing sources inside Fox, alleged that the executive used a portion of Fox's budget to pay for a "Black Room," where PR and surveillances operations against Ailes' perceived enemies--including reporters--were coordinated.
Ailes, who died in May, denied the allegations at the time. On the record, Fox executives insisted to Sherman that they had no knowledge of company money being spent on surveillance or online attacks against reporters.
But, Sherman said, sources inside of Fox told him a different story. "From my own reporting, inside Fox, I know Ailes had hired private investigators to have me surveilled," Sherman told CPJ. "It adds a level of psychological intimidation, if you know your subject has goons out there looking for you." Sherman recalled one particularly chilling incident while he was working on his biography of Ailes: he and his wife noticed a black SUV lurking outside a cabin they were renting--when they tried to approach the car, it peeled out and raced away.
Beyond laws against stalking, assault, and fraud, there's little to prevent the rich and powerful from deploying such tactics to suppress reporting they don't approve of, said Philip Segal, the founder of Charles Griffin Intelligence, a private investigations firm. Segal is an expert on investigative ethics and gives ethics seminars to state bar associations.
He said he believes private investigators should follow strict ethical guidelines and refrain from impersonation tactics. Investigators should not, he said, pay other journalists to gather intelligence for them, unless those reporters are prepared to broadcast that they are not working in their capacity as a reporter.
Getting a clear picture of the scope and breadth of these aggressive private investigations is difficult. "Out of a thousand cases, I'd say one or two involved a reporter," Randy Torgerson, the president of the United States Association of Professional Investigators, an organization with over 600 members, told CPJ.
And, when a reporter is the apparent victim of such an operation, it can be difficult to definitively trace the source. In the BlackCube case, Farrow was able to publish a copy of the firm's contract with Weinstein. But more often than not, obtaining such a document is not possible, leaving reporters with a mixture of circumstantial evidence, suspicion, and the assurances of their own sources.
Lee Fang, an investigative journalist at the Intercept, who has reported for a number of outlets about the sprawling political network funded by the conservative Koch brothers, said he suspects operatives working for the Kochs hacked his private account on the image hosting site Photobucket and circulated an image of him smoking marijuana as a teenager.
The image published by the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon, in a post titled "High Times at The Intercept" that mocked the publication's decision to hire Fang, was taken from a password protected account, Fang said. The Free Beacon was co-founded by Michael Goldfarb, who previously worked as a crisis communications consultant for the Kochs.
Fang told CPJ he can't definitively prove who was behind the hack, but said that his reporting had been flagged by pro-Koch Brothers operatives before, including on a now-defunct website, KochFacts.com, that listed journalists writing critically on the Kochs' political activities.
...
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loudest voice
comm is pwr, = pol
saw self as hero v ctrc: takers, not creators, form gangs xiii holding back the tide
BO uses stim as pol tool; green energy is a worldwide conspriacy by for nations to get control of our resources xiv; if bo reelected, RA pol prisoner xiv
fox peddled as antidote to closed left of msm, but is itself echo xv
hired 1996; at 1st RA kept pol low key; mandate from RM was tabliod, but built aud: 2002 passed CNN; 7 yrs profits may be more than cable and networks news combined xv; RM sez RA paranoid; RM thot of endorse BO 2008 in NY Post thus RA threat to quit; 5 yr contract and complete control. xvi 2010 sez wants to elect next prez; but did not like gop cand esp Huntsman who tweet i bel in evol and trust sci on global w. call me crazy" 4.5 hrs on fox v 11 for cain xvii;
did not like romney (chances?0 so attack BO ) 1st attack ed by network on F and Fr; RA denies, shine blames jr staffer, pulled for www xviii
paul R comp to RR, then had son michael support idea xix; RA prepped ryan
chris ruddy RA = fox
-- kinda skip early life, met joe mcginnis
RA fan on Reni R 31
harry treleven JWT; myth is RA tranf rmn, but more student of HT, Garment and price 38
skip? ... KTLA use douglas elements, pranks, stunts lster used on fox (?) 70
Haldeman tolf h klein to do rept of media coverage of rmn; "balace" i off rebut to CBS on VN1970 RA 14 pp plan capit news service wd be "indep" jrnl by WH; ppl are lazy so watch TV b/c it does the thinking for you 73
haldeman memo on fleet of truck distr videotape; RA marked up praiases, proposes bigger scope, but mos earlier interview had oppos idera of "truth TV"
coors p 98 $800K to pauley TVN telev news inc; ; 2 mil more pledged;
acc in media feedback; paul weyrich advisor; coors po'd that dan e covered. 99 graf called socialist
gould 14 pp Colum Jrnl rev 1st guy to run news while also entert consult firm: coors brews the news" , killed tvn 103 but led to 1st sat news service ITN assoc; met turner at conf, later hired Schonfeld to do 24 hr news, CNN 107.
RA did special with RFK2 wildlife, law sch; 11/05 fox showed the heat is on w/ rfk2 but after right crit, ~ = GW: the debate continues 108
ch 8
gere shadowes for movie Lumet pwr; 1980-86, 13 sen 8 reps wins; not %% 1980 D'Amato (later threat toss out window)
fistfight w/ pal tho hemophilia
offered applic harrison extra $100/wk for sex 114
snyder manson
1976 ok camp for h jack schmiddt apollo but in 1982 neg ad on j bingamen that he freed conviced felon on fbi most w, actually released t fbi so he cd testify 117; based on art'l retracted before spot ran, RA says not my job to pt out fact but the challenger's bing got 54%
next cycle M mconnell, 10 pts down; 117. desperate hounddog ad, tho huddleston present 94%; lost by 5k over million cast.
RR bombed 1st debate v mondale; called in, jr but piped up you shd not have to cram #; brought up age elephant
when crit, plays victim, free sp rights 119
for kasten, ad suggested opp stole $ 750K from nfl union, lost by 3 pts (settled out of ct) 119
88 had choice, went B1 tho van buren last vp elected; 150 yo; gentel=el tea, r mosbacjher, RA and atwater conv b1 to go neg later 126 eg bost harbor gray morning sign for sub base decommissned 126; 1970 duk repeal law on sodomy ansd bestiality (barnyard noises, shot down 127, RA says not negatuive but "comparative" 127
9/21, 4 days before 1st debate, Am for Bush, arm of nat sec pol action committ:weekend passes" grainy shot of horton; ailes denied involve [which wd be illegal coord) but in auf boasy to press, only q is with knofe in hand or not; larry McC last ailes comm prev year, Jesse Raiford there 6 yrs 128; r stone does not think RA involved[why wd we beli?] stone prepped b1
CBS live inrterview, but found out Iran-c q; craig fuller zinger on rather walk out, cued by RA, gave strat eg refute all premise;
threatened budget dir of campaign ; 10 days fter debate Rev Door paslys off Horton ad; RA qpprove tank ad 129; unfav 20 to 43%, bush stayed 40% 129; Duk later sez blew by not respond; b1 wanted to stop ad homand get back to issues, RA says we will day after we win (by 8 pts)
1988 RA brand hurt, puibl book, big tobacco, for 5 yr contraxct; eg prop 99 25 cent tax, when ppl unsure, vote no [so confusion: we have no resp to say anything not to our advantage" 133. ad w/ guy id'd as undercover cop on danger of blk mkt ([by bl ppl?] but actually dsek jockey/actor; Jack Hoar bit part in Dafoe) 58% but RA got 1 mil$
12/91 sez go back to entertainment but june 92 mtg betw B1 and Rush (b1 carried bags to linc bdrm 136); BC war room based on RA strat.
ch 9
jack welch nutron GE set up RA mtg w/ R wright chair nbc; cnbc in trouble; fmr producer Eush out staff freak; RA say shance to get biz for consult co; complic bc CTW picked larry Mc for camp; 143 3 yr conract, Pres title, 500K$, maybe bonus 1.7 mil$/yr (still be prod rush and rbe on bd of Ailes conslutting) 144 blood drain face staff announced 145 partuied w/ kissenger and georgette mosbacher cosmetic.
Brian lewis made bones by convincing a story about RA in paper killed;
doocy prev gig House Party 150
5k$/mo PM (vp corp affairs tom collamore: memo asks RA to get rush to complain about ~ smker.
threat writer doing story on rush, send camera crew to follow kids, GE cools w/ stalk kids? no crew. 152
RA angles for pres of NBC? news? 157
fred friendly son fear of RA "living, breathing integrity crisis" quit for king world synd.
RM says news ch, NBC anted to beat in.
ch 11 aussie
cnn pol no stars, but tried to get some; RA plan to go for younger fox demog, not "reactive" read pol?
RM 9B$ rev/yr 6 continents; backed Thatcher, aus Whitlam and ed koch NY; but US infl papers family owned no sell wsj, nyt wapo. 1985 big buy but had to become US cit and sell NY post 173; next yr rukle change he bot back; new network proit in 5 ys (simpsons MwChildren). RA RM both anti-elite (but Red Ruprt bust on Lenin in coll at Oxford; w/ dad met harry truman in WH. pvt mtg jfk; 40k estate aus; RM mostly anti-estb when met RA, not ideol. 175
both ~ st'ds
60 min copy hired b1 spwtr tony snow WT)but show ordinary?
usually cable co pays 25 cent per viewer; RM flipped and paid cable co'sd 10$ per viwer ?! 183 but spooked otghers to stay out of cable news. RA poached ppl; but ragtag has-beens wanna be's (hannity never fulltime tv?)
FTC fight nasty
9/4 fair and bal" unblur line news vs opinion (label latter he vowed) 196 moody WS to highling MSM bias 198
secret brain room mystery but just WWW res and fact check [oppos?] 201
bulletproof glass in RA office
ch 13
NYPost lost $ for years but good to get mayor guil b/c could help fox 207 (D'A ansd AGul Ailes clients ex?)
big lawsuits vs Time-W; tuener not nice about RM in dpo: dangerous, disgrace to jrnlism; judge 106 pp says no fox nyc
Ch 14 ~ BC
jerry falw help distr ~ BC movie; Cl chronicles; monica spiked cable news, orr and hannity emerge ~ ctrc decline
brit hume wife fight to get WH cred
david brock defector , RA tried to get him to rethink 227
RA tries to hire drudge (hero w winchell) aug 97 wrote sid blumentahl spouse abuse, sued for 30M$
Fox News Sunday tony snow called linda tripp summer 1996 who wanted to do book, linked her to l goldberg
...brit hume made seem urgent even when no new news on monica, player
O'R 1st show promised diff (not info but what to tink about it?) 233 cbs falklands, jump abc 4 jobs in 5 yrs hot temper anchor tabloid Inside Ed (thot rush future, so copy/catch wave) 234 dad worked in Manhattan as acct, portayed selve as scappy levitown; good BS, got some aud, so RA backed him w/ DICK morris
logo burned screen
news/op line break down; RA told Brit H to go after BC
Hannity & C 238 ucsb radio station (tho not student?) house painter; col N hero; had aids wacko says sneeze mosquitos CDC coverup & AMA, conversion therapy, aclu helped him (he sought?) proud of insult les on resume
bush coz ellis on fox election, fox 1st to call last to ~; wife of fox corresp camp for b2; RA derends ellis for using good src 256
911 inhofe cops vs mil 261; RA memo rove; only am won't forgive is under-reaching" 267
bill shine conduit RA directives , also john moody (surrogate buffer?] but best tool Brian Lewis Media Rel, veto on guests, keeps track of empl. 272 leak emb stories about fox ppl who get out of line (no fingerprints)
Geraldo claimed to be in aftermath? of fr fire, but many miles way, claimed fog of war 274
gop war critics pat b and scocroft drowned out by boosters; fox spike after recount, so cnn msnbc under pressure to catuch up (CNN walter issacson coutred gop?!) opp res on CNN "dentist" 279
David Chater sky news idea to put flasg on saddam statue; mil told guys to pill it; 13 kia after, but had holywood end and aud drop 70%
wh comm Dan Barlett arranged B2 on brit h to fix wmd; lots of life ret to normal stories;
ch 18
monica had a real core, but swift boat bs thus transition; hannity big booster, interv w/ oneill (who said they did bunch on interv on several channels, but Fox ad really paid off (bestseller book]
w/ Horton, camp had to pay, but fox did attack on Kerry for free"inject attacks straight into political bloodstream" 288 kerry camp did not want to give legs (? dignify w/ resp, waited 3 weeks [ //duk?] 289
n cavuto said he thot he saw kerry button in bin ladin cave 289
fox news 200M$/yr
Brock wanted to "work the refs" by left, Media Matters 293 may 2004, but had to com enetertain w/ news (right had eneded left mono on comedy?) 293 but fox, regnery, talk radio echo chamber to mock left; Franken books ~
O'R always looking to monetize brand [cf Stratfor]
jeremy glick dad died port authority at wtc[he studied/ trained] ; abused staff, harass worker
fox lost 15? post katrina; O'r did well, not H&C
liked palin, showed her NY, foto op w/ Kissenger
got Beck (CNN show up 200%) new age slf help plus RW; let him have own co and PR ppl 334
fox news shapes news (wear TP costume)
new bl p, abuse led to defections, replaced by weak or fantic: bill sammo WT, managing editior NY bureua; media matters got memos on agw and aca ; also on cruise admitted BS socialsit BS
moody repl by Michael Clement, black helo shit, spy on newsroom
van j asked for sec service prot, beck sez commie felon; video of calling gop aholes {problem?], tricked into signing truther petit
4 days after resign, ACORN JOK; vid turned down by all (incl fox) but breitbart pushed it "Abu Ghraib of the Gt Soc" 335
fox wd only show aca town hall if screamers
mak garett quit, showed end of fair and bal. b/c cnn msnbc left, he did not to have bal on fox 337. CNN no partisan brand, spiralled.
james pinkerton told to write attack blog eg david brock in tank top w/ b frank.
hired palin 1 m/yr, plus huck, sant, newt, john bolton = pres cands potential. 342
beck almost 3 mill, but he and palin burn too hot, palin prima dona; ~ RA advice, plain release blood libel vid
---bot house in conn and then newspaper
beck on way out, linc mem resoting honor rally not coverted much (exec went in cawe something blew up badly) b lewis resewnt indep pwr base; leaked fake low salary for Cheatwood to hurt future slaary/ 700K$?! 372
RA worried about BO reelect, so christie mtg w/ rush at RA home;
his personal ideol hurt positions gop could take on green nergy etc; palin broke news of run on talk radio RA PO'd.
brock Fox Eeefect bk
after 2012 gmu and va demo artl said fox rise oppos of gop to win nat'l maj; 384
paranoid DCCC taget assass.
===
review eh
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/books/2014/01/roger_ailes_biography_the_loudest_voice_in_the_room_by_gabriel_sherman_reviewed.html
Gabriel Sherman is part of a group of young media reporters—many starting out at the New York Observer under the tutelage of then-Editor Peter Kaplan, an avowed media nostalgist—who have seen their subject, the power of the media, pulled out from under them. The culturally dominant, class-conscious, politically influential, and largely liberal news business, the subject of big books of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, started to die just as their careers began.
A desire to recover that centrality, and to hold accountable the forces that diminished it, seems to motivate Sherman’s book about Fox News chief Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country. Sherman’s conceit is that he is still writing about something at the center of American life and culture, something that has turned evil, rather than, in fact, marginal. In a sense, this book is a quest for a whale—but it is one the author can’t find, has no intrinsic feeling for, and that is able to elude him.
Many people have pursued this whale. The Fox News story has been told by the documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald in Outfoxed, and in a variety of other antipathetic accounts, including Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Sherman’s hardly bringing anything meaningfully new to this story. But that is not his book’s principal shortcoming.
The shortcoming is its failure to tell the story with feeling. The Loudest Voice in the Room is a dour and grudging account. A book is a long slog for a reader, as well as for a writer, when you don’t want to spend time with the subject.
Sherman’s story is most vivid when it quotes Ailes himself. But, in a fairly underhanded way, only at the end does Sherman reveal that Ailes refused to talk to him. The book is, in effect, a compilation of Ailes’ memorable public barbs and bon mots. These are often presented as direct quotes, creating a puzzling effect: You want more, but the author, with only his Ailes bits and bobs, can’t give it.
Sherman is not a very good writer. In a peculiar afterword, he comes oddly close to admitting this, lavishing thanks on all those who supplied him remedial help. (He calls the book a collaboration). This help is not enough to overcome his relentless, flattened newsmagazine sentence structure (bad enough in short magazine bites, murder in a whole book).
Why did Sherman have so much trouble getting to the always-talkative Roger Ailes?
But the even larger issue is the architecture of his story—the whole is never greater than its parts. It takes almost half the book to meet the Ailes of moment and consequence. Before that we get a plodding biography of someone who is fundamentally an insider player, whom we have no connection to or reason to be interested in. Believing we shouldn’t like him is not the same as caring about him.
Sherman tries awkwardly to connect Ailes’ childhood to the later Ailes. “The television screen was Roger’s classroom,” intones Sherman. Although Ailes was born in 1940, and television would not begin to be a significant presence until Ailes was well into his teens. Because of Ailes’ acting experience in high school, Sherman somehow concludes that “Ailes was a natural broadcaster” by the time he reached college. “Making a home for himself was also a way for Ailes to find stability,” writes Sherman about Ailes’ first marriage—a fair representation of the book’s psychological depth.
Ailes’ rich and opportunistic relationship with Richard Nixon hardly inspires Sherman’s analysis. “The legend of Roger Ailes has it that he almost single-handedly transformed Nixon from a schlump to a president with his talk-show alchemy. But the truth was more complicated.” You don’t say?
It was Joe McGinniss’s seminal book The Selling of the President that most vividly captured Ailes’ role in the Nixon campaign, and vaunted Ailes to national attention. Sherman cribs and flattens McGinniss’s book for many pages. (Without the slightest self-awareness, Sherman notes that McGinniss’s book would have died had he failed to get access to the Nixon campaign.) His helpful conclusion: “Ailes proved a shrewd promoter of his own image.”
Along with conservative politics, it is basic business that Sherman dislikes. “Ailes treated journalism as he treated politics—it was another market to monetize,” writes Sherman, scornfully. “Ailes inspired young producers eager to advance, but clashed with senior employees who posed threats,” says Sherman, turning the personality push-pull of any television production, or, for that matter, any career, into a morality tale.
No, Sherman does not like Ailes. Can’t stand him. Looks down on him. Is holding his nose the whole time he writes about him.
Sherman’s approach is standard magazine journalism, an aggregation of known facts—a clip job—and then some added-value source or quote or reveal. But without access to any of the principals in the story, Sherman is forced to rely on those people who will talk to him, and, with News Corp., Fox, and Ailes adamantly locked down, almost all of his sources are people out to settle scores with Ailes.
What’s more, the technique Sherman uses incorporates a source’s views into the narrative, making it extremely difficult to unravel whose version with what ax to grind we are being served. Bob Wright, NBC’s former chairman, and a man famous for his grudges, gets to tell, in unflattering fashion, the story of Ailes’ tenure running CNBC. Executives displaced by Ailes’ hiring at News Corp. tell the story of his arrival there. (Sherman says Ailes called Rupert Murdoch to solicit the job, while, in fact, Murdoch tells the story with him calling Ailes first.)
The pivotal event in Fox’s early years, the network’s coverage of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, is told by David Shuster, the reporter who initially covered the story for Fox and then, disgruntled, left for MSNBC. Cynthia Talkov, another disaffected Fox reporter, appears to be the main source for Sherman’s dissection of Fox’s 2000 Bush-Gore election night coverage. Brian Lewis, the former Fox PR executive who continues to have a raging public feud with Ailes, is a source throughout much of this section.
The story of Murdoch’s oldest son Lachlan’s tangle with News Corp. executives, including Ailes, is a version provided by Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, who has waged a famous public spitting match with Ailes (causing his father-in-law to stop speaking to him). Freud is not openly sourced in the book, but the story as told here is the same version he has provided to me—one at odds with many other sources. The version Sherman presents is full of greater and smaller errors and misinterpretations. The greatest of these places Ailes as the central plotter against Lachlan, who left the company in 2005, whereas it was, in fact, then-COO Peter Chernin who defenestrated Lachlan (and who was himself ultimately shown the door).
Ailes’ and News Corp.’s contretemps with book publisher Judith Regan is told either through the eyes of Regan herself, not a source that I can fathom anyone taking uncritically, or by cherry-picking the version of the facts partial to her (and mostly supplied by her) in the news coverage at the time, and ignoring the more plentiful material that discredited her. The assertion that she got Murdoch’s permission to pay O.J. Simpson for a show she proposed to do with him is entirely untrue. Murdoch had not spoken to Regan for three years before this. Nor, as Sherman says, was it Jane Friedman of HarperCollins who unilaterally ordered Regan fired—this was a carefully plotted strategy at the highest reaches of the company. Sherman characterizes Regan’s payout of $10.75 million as a victory, whereas that was the amount owed to her under her contract. Her suit was an effort to get more beyond that.
It’s a cacophony of resentment and inevitable distortion—with more than 400 unnamed sources by my count. But it is not just that Sherman is telling the story wrong. He is telling the wrong story.
Sherman, similarly to what Aaron Sorkin does in the reality-bending HBO show The Newsroom, treats his subject like an all-powerful network colossus—albeit, a network gone to the devil. But this is not network television, it is, in an altogether different context, culture, and effect, cable.
Fox’s prime-time audience averages 1.1 million. Network news audiences in the great old days reached 40 million. Sherman’s thesis that Ailes “divided a country” is quite absurd. What Ailes did do is to help turn politics into a special interest category. It is not just the Fox view that is a closed ecosystem—it is the liberal view of the Fox view that is as much a part of the bubble. Perfectly targeted co-dependents.
Even though we are politically far apart, over the years I’ve had many occasions to talk to Ailes and interview him (which prompts me to wonder why Sherman had so much trouble getting to the always-talkative Ailes). In every instance he has been not just extraordinarily open, but marvelously expressive about what he does. It’s remarkable and entertaining conversation. Beyond his conservative politics, which have evolved over his lifetime, Ailes holds a much more long-standing worldview, which is about outflanking anyone, conservatives included, who is more earnest, self-congratulatory, sanctimonious, and sentimental than he is. Ailes is always the other. He is the rebel, destructive or otherwise. He’s the guy who upsets the apple cart. Arguably, that apple cart includes the Republican Party, which is more often than not caught off-balance by Ailes—not good politics if you are a Republican, but good television if you are Ailes.
The frame of this story might have more helpfully and dramatically been the fall of media as we know it and the rise of insurgencies, of which Ailes is one. The lessons to be learned from Ailes are less about politics than about the way to profitably redefine and speak to segmented audiences—quite an opposite notion of Sherman’s thesis about dividing the country. Ailes hasn’t divided the country. He’s chipped off his own profitable piece of it.
Sherman’s bias here is not just political. It’s temperamental. Ailes is, by nature, a troublemaker, and Sherman, one suspects, is by temperament a good boy. A more astute analysis than Sherman cares to or is able to give might have made for an exciting book. It’s the whale’s strength, agility, and instincts that we want to know about—not its size. We already know a whale is big.
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The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided A Country by Gabriel Sherman. Random House.
Michael Wolff's most recent book is The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Rupert Murdoch.
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CAPTURE PB 4/9/2012
fox effect:
Ailes (RA) pitched fox concept to RMN admin, coors $ for Ur TVN 28 mlk red, epa alarmist
had to keep firing staff and mgmt b/c they were actually trying to be prof jrnlists 31
RA brought lee atwater into b1
RA mge guiliani, then worked for rush
Ellis, bush cousin told RA b2 had lost, but then fox made opposite call? 55
Brit Hume said swift boat had big effect
same play by Wa Times affiliate www that siad BO went to madrassa65
graphic claimed castro had endorsed HC and BO 70
Corsi flogged book on Fox 74
Dick Morris worked for Trent lott and jesse helm, then BC but quit b/ cof prost scandal, 180 on BC, paid contrib on fox DM said bo was gen'l counsel for acorn, and voter fraud, and akked fox viewers to go to a PC that paid him 77 Nat'l Rep Trust
his book fleeced predicted stock mkt crash after bo elected. Fox blamed BO for recession, and "forgot" that bailout started under b2 80
Fox started w/ conserv POV then went to GOP pov
kinder gentler:
Roger Ailes: Fox News Is On A 'Course Correction' Away From Far Right
The Huffington Post Jack Mirkinson First Posted: 9/26/11
Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has given one of his typically candid interviews to Newsweek. The interview was published Monday.
For a man who first made his name as a media guru for Richard Nixon, Ailes is often surprisingly forthcoming about Fox News and his opinions. In previous interviews, he has called NPR executives "Nazis" (he later apologized), said he didn't mind if people thought Glenn Beck was fired from the channel, and admitted that he wants both Bill and Hillary Clinton to join Fox News.
Behind the scenes, Ailes is reported to have clashed with Sarah Palin and told Beck to cool his more controversial rhetoric.
Monday's interview offered up more of Ailes' unvarnished opinions about his network and his employees. He made a big admission to Newsweek, saying that he has made a "course correction" at Fox News, veering it away from the hard-right line it took in the earlier days of the Obama administration. (Ailes offered a preview of this strategy in January, when he told Russell Simmons that he had ordered his anchors and pundits to "tone it down" in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.) Beck's departure, as well as a more nuanced approach to his most famous pundit, Sarah Palin, have been part of that strategy, Ailes said.
He also spoke openly about many of his anchors, saying that Bill O'Reilly "hates" Sean Hannity because he's jealous of his radio success (and thus confirming years of rumors about the animosity between the two).
Ailes also called Hannity "predictable" and said that he sometimes has to have a word with Shepard Smith when Smith says things that may not go over well with the Fox News crowd. (He didn't say whether he was referring to Smith's seemingly pro-union comments about the Wisconsin protests, or his saying that the killing of Osama bin Laden was illegal and that American foreign policy is on a dangerous path.)
Read the full interview, including news about Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry's relationship with Ailes, here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/roger-ailes-fox-news-course-correction_n_980850.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
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http://gawker.com/5814150
ur-Fox plan
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Dark Genius on Ailes
Dark Genius: The Influential Career of Legendary Political Operative and Fox ...
By Kerwin Swint
http://books.google.com/books?id=mL8KI_kP0MMC&dq=Dark+Genius+on+Ailes&source=gbs_navlinks_s
ch 7 Horton
http://books.google.com/books?id=mL8KI_kP0MMC&q=Willie+Horton&dq=Dark+Genius+on+Ailes&source=gbs_word_cloud_r&cad=4#v=snippet&q=Willie%20Horton&f=false
ads said 268 escaped, implying murderers, but only 4, and only one WH, did crime in 10 yrs p 91
revolving door, boston harbor, tank
88 huge win but RA "hot potato" and bailed out of politics. all clients 88-'92 lost, sough redemption
Floyd Brown
Dark Genius on Ailes
http://books.google.com/books?id=mL8KI_kP0MMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Dark+Genius&source=bl&ots=8K1Ul2dD1U&sig=d5R-VBve6U-DiUIUbi3VbpnOPWg&hl=en&ei=pG47TK63B4aesQP81PTaCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13&ved=0CEwQ6AEwDA#v=onepage&q&f=false
not sjpl, requested 1:01 PM 7/12/2010
RA key in nixon 68, gingrich, rudy, rush, fox p 1
right sees itself arrayed against dark force: rmn commies, rr big gov and comies, RM and RA liberal anti-am media p 2
mike douglas sang prince charm for disney cinderlla p10
daisy girl p 14
mike douglas met rmn when put in RA's office so no contact with Little Egypt's boa `16
created persona based on images for RMN and B1
kinda town hall, hand picked; questioons taken, but then collated to questions nixonteam wanted to answer p 27
Pat Buchanan urged rmn not to visti mlk widow b/c would outrage some supporters 36
denied Horton role, but then ran kidnapper scam w/ next 2 clients 38, incl Rudy. only q is show w or w/o knife p 88 2 track system NSPAC runs dirty version (floyd brown
Horton
buddy Craig Shirley at NSPAC anti-clinton 89
in bush version said 268 escaped, actually 4 murdersin 10 yrs and only horton offended 91 Duk soft on crime rose to 65% 92
FEC found connections between NSPAC and bush team 94-5
revolving door , boston harbor (in fact 1st gov to try to clean, (good green record) 52 blocked by gop, tank
had mole in cbs so prepared when bush1 did interview w/ Rather 47 iran contra thus deflected
CA anti-cig campaign busted b/c guy was actor in Bond movie 56 (was a copp, but notundercover. clained he no longer worked for tobacco, but was 57
launched mcconnell, #2 in tobaco $ 57 bloodhound ad 1st comic
TVN coors funded 60, forerunner to fox.
rmn appt coors to cpb on way out door as FY, EEOC invst for anti-union
union carbide client GE
ch 11 talk radio hist , rush 136
ch on fox, current affair (imitation of?)
FCC routinely ruled in favor of RM 148
RM did deal with China's people's Daily 151
Jim Moody does memo of day 68 all tvn had to be vetted by heritage, tvn purge '74
coached RR after beaten in 1st debate p 18
go w/ gut, themes, reclcled age joke
advised bush2 even after at Fox (nono) 216
22
same personality plus perfomance model taken to Fox
new nixon p 22 harry treleven and frank shakespeare honchos)
---
Whitaker and Baxter were in turn succeeded by another Californian, Murray Chotiner, who took
Richard Nixon under his wing in 1945 and groomed him in the techniques of political
campaigning. Nixon's career spanned the rise of television as a new medium that transformed
both entertainment and politics. "It was Nixon's television performance in his Checkers
speech that saved his place as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in 1952," notes historian
David Greenberg, the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image. "In a historic piece
of image-craft, Nixon talked earnestly about his onerous childhood and his struggles upon
returning from the Navy--and adorned his speech with folksy touches about his wife's cloth
coat and his daughters' cocker spaniel. So effective was his self-portrait that telegrams
flooded in to the studio praising his sincerity, forcing Eisenhower to retain him. Only a
handful of liberal critics dissented, warning that Nixon was using insidious new techniques
to misrepresent himself--and endanger democracy. But Nixon innovated further." Following his
defeat in the 1960s election against John F. Kennedy, Nixon set out to reinvent himself,
hiring professional image manipulators including William Safire, then a New York public
relations executive; advertising executives H.R. Haldeman and Harry Treleaven; and
television producer Roger Ailes (currently the head of Fox News). Long before Bill Clinton
played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show or Arnold Schwarzenegger traded quips with Jay
Leno, Nixon paved the way by appearing on the comedy show Laugh-In to say "Sock it to me" as
part of his 1968 campaign strategy for overcoming his humorless image.
Before Roger Ailes met Nixon, he was an executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show, a
popular TV talk and variety program. They met in 1967, while Nixon was waiting to appear as
a guest on the show. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,"
Nixon said.
"Television is not a gimmick," Ailes replied, and Nixon hired him.
The problem for the Nixon campaign, Ailes said, is that "a lot of people think Nixon is
dull. Think he's a bore, a pain in the ass. They think he's the kind of kid who always
carried a book bag. . . . Now you put him on television, you've got a problem right away.
He's a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody put him in a closet overnight and he jumps
out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to
be President.' I mean this is how he strikes some people."
To change this image, the campaign paid to produce a series of television shows, in which
Nixon fielded questions from panels of citizens. Although the shows were broadcast live,
both the audiences and the panel were prescreened by the campaign, chosen carefully to have
the right demographics--just enough blacks, for example, but not too many. Panel members
were chosen so they would ask just enough tough questions to make the shows feelspontaneous, and since the audience was all Republican, applause was guaranteed.
"The audience is part of the show," Ailes said during a discussion with Harry Treleaven
about whether to allow reporters to watch the tapings. "And that's the whole point. Our
television show. And the press has no business on the set. And goddammit, Harry, the problem
is that this is an electronic election. The first there's ever been. TV has the power now.
Some of the guys get arrogant and rub the reporters' faces in it and then the reporters get
pissed and go out of their way to rap anything they consider staged for TV. And you know
damn well that's what they'd do if they saw this from the studio. You let them in there with
the regular audience and they see the warmup. They see Jack Rourke [the show's warm-up man]
out there telling the audience to applaud and to mob Nixon at the end, and that's all they'd
write about it."
In 1968, Nixon's success in reinventing himself as the "New Nixon" helped him win the White
House. When journalist Joe McGinniss detailed this strategy the next year in The Selling of
the President, shamefaced reporters vowed to get wise to such manipulation, but the Nixon
campaign was just the beginning. Although his impeachment in the Watergate scandal meant a
temporary setback, the Republicans roared back into the White House in 1980 with Ronald
Reagan, the first actor ever to become president. Reagan also relied on the talents of
Ailes, who served as a consultant to his 1984 re-election campaign. Ailes oversaw production
of the now legendary "Morning in America" campaign television ads, designed by Madison
Avenue executive Philip Dusenberry and featuring swelling violin music and emotional,
issue-free imagery of weddings, flag-raising, home-buying and peaceful, scenic vistas.
Ailes used a similar strategy in 1988, when he worked with Lee Atwater to mastermind George
H.W. Bush's come-from-behind victory over Michael Dukakis. The Bush/Quayle '88 campaign
combined morning-in-America imagery with ads that ridiculed Dukakis through deceptive visual
imagery. One TV spot took Dukakis to task for pollution in Boston Harbor, displaying a sign
that said, "Danger/Radiation Hazard/No Swimming." The sign actually had nothing to do with
pollution or Dukakis. It was posted to warn Navy personnel not to swim in waters that had
once harbored nuclear submarines under repair.
The most egregious ads, however, used visual imagery to exploit racial feelings. One
featured a threatening photograph of William Horton, a black inmate who had escaped from a
prison-furlough program and raped a woman, to suggest that Dukakis was unusually soft on
crime. (Actually, Massachusetts was one of 45 states with prison furlough programs at the
time of Horton's crime.) A second prison-furlough ad depicted a "revolving door" through
which a line of white men entered prison, while blacks and Hispanics exited. "That phrase
'revolving-door prison policy' implies, of course, that Massachusetts criminals could,
thanks to Governor Dukakis, slip out of jail as easily as commuters streaming from a subway
station," observes Mark Crispin Miller. "But the image makes an even more inflammatory
statement. . . . The 'revolving door' effects an eerie racial metamorphosis, implying that
the Dukakis prison system was not only porous, but a satanic source of negritude--a dark
'liberal' mill that took white men and made them
colored."...http://www.counterpunch.org/stauber05272004.html
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