the saga of roger ailes and fox "news" - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 07-18-2011, 12:02 PM

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory | Rolling Stone Politics

in case there was any doubt that fox is a conservative political propaganda outlet that masquerades as a news organization...

here is a sub-article--linked in the original---that tracks a day's worth of far right talking points wrapped up as if they were information:

Distort, Attack, Repeat: The Fox Propaganda Machine in Action | Rolling Stone Politics

much of this was already known if you happened to watch the documentary "outfoxed"

OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

but that film was in kind of limited distribution.

what you find the in piece is:

a biography of roger ailes.
a political bio inside of that--his role in packaging nixon, then reagan, then bushes 1 and 2.
the imbrication of ailes and limbaugh
information about the intertwining of conservative ideological talking points and information
information about the purging of actual journalists at fox, the use of political litmus tests to enforce them
a sense of the power of fox news in american politics:

Quote:

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America’s most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypassomging the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as “matadors” who want to “tear down the social order” with their “elitist, horse-dung, socialomgist thinking.” Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. "I’m not in politics," Ailes recently boasted. "I’m in ratings. We’re winning."

it seems to me a good thing that last week the fbi opened an investigation into possible phone hacking involving fox and families of victims of 9/11 and personally i hope that it reveals enough of what happened to bring this whole edifice down.

but it seems to me that there have to be grounds to take down fox news quite independently of this. it is not a news organization: it is a political infotainment generator.

Quote:

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

sound familiar?

what do you make of this article?
does it provide you with information you did not already know about fox news?
do you accept the argument that fox is not in fact a news organization at all, but rather a conservative political propaganda machine?
if you accept the argument, what do you think should be done about fox?

is it the case that, following on a notion of free speech, that anything goes? that non-news can be packaged as news? ideology as information? narrow, xenophobic viewpoints as information about the world?