Read how the Fox Network under Roger Ailes works on fear, if you want to know why American politics is so dysfunctional they can have a tea party but can’t manage a budget.
A couple of extracts:
Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65. Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, commercials for products such as Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”).
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 is held to the same standard of evidence as a political campaign 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 Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail healthcare reform in 1993.
Roger Ailes is Murdoch’s spawn because Fox makes the most money for Murdoch. But according to the article from the Guardian, abbreviated from Rolling Stone, even Murdoch is afraid of Ailes. Ailes also runs a so-called “brain room” which has faced allegations of systematic phone-hacking.One of Fox’s targets is NPR, or National Public Radio. Late last year Ailes had to apologise for calling National Public Radio “Nazis”.
Murdoch says he is proud of his company. I wouldn’t be. Ailes’s crap is on our screens too, on Sky.
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