and little things like that
If you’re going to be a mole, the first thing you need to learn is how to steal a video without leaving electronic tracks. And since his second post was about the bathrooms at Fox News, I’m not sure we’ll be missing much now that he’s been evicted from his burrow.
But I guess it says something about me that I’m going to keep reading.
According to Gawker today:
What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole—a long-standing, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization.
I predict the “regular dispatches” will cease rather quickly. The Fox will very soon find its prey.
And I would have changed the caption on this video the mole stole, to “Romney’s not a robot after all!” He’s disarmingly human here – even though most of us humans don’t have multiple horses.
[trying a different video that hopefully will embed]
[This is one of my all-time favorite songs - play it while you read, because this is a little long.]
On September 9, 2009, Sky News (until just recently, almost a shoe-in to join Rupert Murdoch’s empire) reported that The Sun (owned by Rupert Murdoch), would no longer support Gordon Brown’s Labour Party:
The Sun newspaper paper has ditched the Labour Party and switched its allegiance to David Cameron’s Tories. Sky’s political editor Adam Boulton described the move as “a nail in the coffin of the Prime Minister”. But Gordon Brown told Boulton: “The people decide elections, not the newspapers and it’s people who make up their minds.”
Right, Gordon. We all know how that turned out.
If you lived in England then, you’d be forgiven for thinking things would never change; that Murdoch’s empire would continue to control your country’s politics.
We all know how that turned out. Former Tory Press Secretary: arrested. News of the World shut down. Former editor of News of the World and the Sun, current (until last Sunday) CEO of News Corp: arrested. Head of Scotland Yard: resigned.
If you live in the United States now, you’d be forgiven for thinking Fox News (owned by Murdoch) will never change; that Roger Ailes will continue to control our country’s politics. As Tom Dickinson wrote last May in Rolling Stone:
To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. …
The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.
But: a couple things. First of all, Ailes is not beloved in Murdoch Land.
Again, from Dickinson:
Many within Murdoch’s family have come to viscerally hate Ailes. Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi, has worked to soften her husband’s politics, and his son James has persuaded him to embrace the reality of global warming – even as Ailes has led the drumbeat of climate deniers at Fox News. Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law and a top PR executive in Britain, recently told reporters, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.” [Ed note: well, we all know how that turned out]
“Rupert is surrounded by people who regularly, if not moment to moment, tell him how horrifying and dastardly Roger is,” says Wolff, the Murdoch biographer. “Wendi cannot stand Roger. Rupert’s children cannot stand Roger. So around Murdoch, Roger has no supporters, except for Roger himself.”
It will take more than pressure from Murdoch’s family, though to bring Ailes down, considering that some of his family are having their own difficulties right now. But then there’s this interesting little tidbit, from The Nation:
“Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?”
That’s how Portfolio.com began a post back in 2008, when a former Fox News executive charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured “brain room” in Fox’s New York headquarters for “counterintelligence” and may have used it to hack into private phone records.
Now, this is an old story, and Fox denied it in early 2008:
A Fox News spokeswoman says there’s no truth to the claim that the network has the capability to snoop through phone records.
Yes, Roger.
We live in America, not England, and we can certainly be forgiven for thinking things will never change; that Murdoch’s empire, led by Roger Ailes, will continue to control our country’s politics.
But did you listen to the song?
It must be so satisfying to live in England and see them all dropping like flies. All the delicious questions about what comes next: David Cameron? Les Hinton?
I keep trying to think up ways in which Roger Ailes could get embroiled, but, unfortunately, it seems as if his star could rise. Altlhough what Fox News does is criminal, it’s not illegal, so he’s one of the few Murdoch cronies whose hands are still clean.
Maybe he’ll get the Wall Street Journal now as part of his portfolio, since it’s become so Foxified.
My new hospice patient had Fox News on yesterday, and now you can find me inside the fair and balanced bubble. The Obamas’ vacation? Well, they got criticized for going to Acadia instead of the Gulf Coast, so now they’re going to Pensacola. It’s all a political stunt: you know Bill Clinton did polling to figure out where he should go. Fortunately, the two Bushes and Reagan had their own compounds for their vacations.
And do you know why the Democrats are turning against Obama’s Afghanistan policies? Well, they really don’t care for foreign military engagements in the first place, so they had to bite their tongues about Afghanistan, but now that it doesn’t look so good they’re reverting to their default position.
And a lot of people in Arizona were waiting with bated breath (and appearing every fifteen minutes) for the judge’s ruling on their immigration law and they were sure the judge would see it their way, because the administration clearly doesn’t care about all the criminals preying on the white people there.
And I also now know more than I ever wanted to about the couple whose son died in Iraq (“Thank you for your service,” says the chirpy pretty anchor lady) who are being told by his cemetery to take down the ten-foot flagpoles they put up.
In retrospect, you have to admire Lyndon Johnson. “There goes the South for a generation,” he supposedly said after his civil rights legislation was passed. All those reliable (white, male) Southern Democrats? Republicans now.
I promised a loyal reader I’d explain this Oliphant cartoon I posted a few days ago:
Well, Johnson gave us the first half of the explanation. Racism is the key to the Republicans’ base, and Karl Rove, Fox News, and Breitbart/Limbaugh/Beck/O’Reilly know this. They hold the key.
But they’re so dirty, and so clever. If you have a weakness you don’t want someone else to know about, Lee Atwater taught Rove, accuse them of it. And so I give you Andrew Breitbart, in an interview with Politics Daily:
Q: Anything else folks should know about this or about Andrew Breitbart?
A: Believe it or not, one of my primary motives on this planet is to stop this racism, and to stop the Democratic Party’s use of race that divides us intentionally.
She had the temerity to criticize the reverse racism and “manufactured outrage” of Fox News, so Bill O’Reilly thought he’d take her down a peg or two by mocking her. It didn’t work. You have to watch this – she’s so calm and funny and incisive all at the same time.
My favorite quote:
You were trying to take the attention off me saying that your network, FOX News, continually crusades on flagrantly bogus stories designed to make white Americans fear black Americans, which FOX News most certainly does for a political purpose even if it upends the lives of individuals like Shirley Sherrod, even as it frays the fabric of the nation, and even as it makes the American Dream more of a dream and less of a promise.
Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate
The only way I ever see Fox News is via Jon Stewart, so maybe I’m missing the fair and balanced part; but whenever I see or read their distortions, smears, and outright lies, I think about the people for whom this is their only source of news – like the two Republicans who work with my very progressive Democratic friend, whose only retort when presented with the facts is “Where did you read that? In the New York Times?” with the sarcastic emphasis the italics imply.
Or my former business partner, who scoffed at the idea that Bush should not act unilaterally in Iraq; who was convinced there were weapons of mass destruction there and that we could spread democracy in the Middle East; and who believed there was a liberal media War on Christmas.
But Ross Douthat, who’s a conservative himself but seems able to be quite reasonable, has a very interesting piece today. Before Fox News existed, he believes the conservatives got a lot done (you could argue with some of this, like was Reagan really responsible for the Berlin Wall coming down, and was starving the government a good thing in the long term); whereas now, when the lies they tell about Obama’s “socialism” make you want to strangle someone, we’ve gotten the economic stimulus plan, healthcare reform, and are poised (yes I believe it) on the brink of financial reform.
So what do you think? Are the people who love Fox News now actually people who can’t get things done?
