Murdoch, Ailes, Weymouth pump Bloomberg at Breindel Awards
“I’ve been quoted as saying, ‚Äö√Ñ√≤This is a great country.’ A lot of people are trying to get in, nobody’s trying to get out. The press is an essential pillar of that democracy. The press didn’t invent democracy. Democracy invented freedom of the press. So we will investigate anything and find the truth, and report it, but we do not get up every morning, assuming that our country is guilty. We just happen to like democracy.”…. And he had some choice words for Democratic candidates who have decided not to debate on Fox….. “The candidates that can’t face Fox, can’t face Al Qaeda,” said Mr. Ailes. “And that’s what’s coming.”…. That was followed by applause from the crowd which featured several News Corp. executives and journalists from Murdoch-owned papers‚Äö√Ñ√ÆRichard Johnson, the Post’s Page Six editor, for one.
There are those in the media industry who think that they are the Alpha and the Omega when it comes to bestowing their wisdom and insight upon those not fortunate enough to have achieve their exalted degree of enlightenment. Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly come to mind, f’rinstance. Though Dobbs is a CNN employee and O’Reilly plys his wares on Fox News Channel, they both have benefited handsomely from the highly partisan media machine created by Roger Ailes at Fox News Channel. Thanks to Ailes, trenchant journalistic analysis has been replaced by partisan hacks speechifying and propagandizing at full volume while the practitioners hide behind the facade of journalism. The depths to which the quality of public discourse has sunks is due in large part to the monster the Roger Ailes has created. Those on the Right no doubt think that this is as it should be. Those on the Left are, like myself, appalled at what passes for “informed” debate over the public airwaves.
Roger Ailes (and his patron, Rupert Murdoch) is almost single-handedly responsible for the sorry state of political discourse in this country. Not that the level of political debate has ever been anything approaching civil, but Ailes created in Fox News Channel a way to wrap the partisan politics of personal destruction in the facade of impartial journalism. “Fair and balanced” is arguably the biggest propaganda coup since “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”… a canard that Fox News Channel played a large part in foisting upon the American Sheeple.
Yeah, Roger Ailes is a DUMB@$$…like a Fox. He’s discovered that Right-wing propaganda that appeals to the raw, unfiltered emotions of the American Sheeple really CAN be packaged and marketed as impartial journalism. “Fair and balanced”, my ass. Sadly there are far too many Americans who will tell you with a straight face that because Fox News Channel isn’t part of the “Liberal Media”, they really are fair and balanced.
Somewhere, Josef Goebbels is smiling….
