Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers.Fox and Ailes today sell biased and slanted as "fair and balanced" - - in other words, something it is not because it is actually the opposite.
The memo—called, simply enough, "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes' work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries.
Along the lines of "jumbo" shrimp, or "express" mail, or soaps and cereals placed bu corporate sharpies into fresh packaging called "new and improved."
Enter into this Ailes-inspired modern political world one Scott Fitzgerald, Republican Majority Leader of the Wisconsin State Senate who, without apology or shame or the slightest moral flinch is openly running Republicans masquerading as Democrats in upcoming recall elections.
The presence of an additional Democrat on the ballot sews confusion, forces the addition of a primary (and the public's expense) and adds more time for the real Republicans to organize and raise money.
There's little difference between injecting phonied-up and mislabeled information into the political debate and inserting phonied-up candidates into elections.
I don't really care, but I'm just sayin...lol
ReplyDeleteThat's a bit of a bait-and-switch headline you got goin there.
A Reader thinks it means Fitz-Ailes have been discovered to be in real life cahoots. Turns out to be a behavioral, metaphysical, existentialist "oh look we're both cockroaches" similarity.
XDD
Something they teach at the Hacienda de Jornalismo maybe ???
I took the "bait-and-switch" as a tongue-in-cheek Glenn Beck parody. In this case, the switch is even better than the bait.
ReplyDeleteGood find, James! I appreciate the historical reference to the "liberal establishment media" faux-nightmare.
@Annie - - People with Goog;e Search set to Ailes metaphysical existential will thank you for all their traffic this morning.
ReplyDeleteThis thing has 318 pages, I want to read them all:
ReplyDelete"Without these things [eradication of the metaphorical cancer that is communications-failure] America will be nothing more than a history lesson in a student-run college of the twenty-first century. America, the most progressive example of government in the history of mankind, will be summed up in the following quiz some semester end in the future:
Question: America lasted a little over two hundred years. Why is she considered important to world history?
Answer: In the beginning, many learned people considered her the model of societies to come and actually believed that people could overcome internal problems and live in freedom.
Question: Why did America fail?
Answer: Apparently, there was an inability of enough of her business and political leaders to translate the ideals she stood for into practical everyday solutions. This caused an internal cancer which was most noticeable by its symptom of a prevailing national negative attitude.
Question: When and why did America finally die?
Answer: Sometime between 1970 and 1980 she became so burdened down with negativism that everybody thought it futile to get involved, so she simply gave up her will to live." (p6, emphasis added)
I do not appreciate the hyperbolic suicide metaphore.
On a lighter note, this reads like the Scott Walker attack plan - current phase is continued insistence that the public doesn't care about recalls. Watch out, Wisconsin, he's trying to burden you down with negativism.
Wisconsin Hypothesis- I've had the same theory with right-wing media trying to downplay the protests and recall movement. One of the GOP's goals is to dispirit the average person enough that they say "It doesn't matter", or "our whole political system is ridiculous" so they don't vote or give 2010-style protest votes to the GOP. As a result, this would make democracy a smaller field that's more likely to be run by oligarchs, and the oligarchs are much more likely to give the GOP enough cover to let them throw in all this evil garbage that will take longer than 2 years to undo.
ReplyDeleteSame trick they're trying to pull in D.C. by using a gov't shutdown to reap confusion, wreck the economy, and try to blame Obama and the Dems for it. The GOP's disdain for the average person's outcomes is one of the most disgusting things about them.