Obituary: Roger Ailes

In a rather shocking development, political-operative-turned-news-(read propaganda)-mogul Roger Ailes, 77, has died, just a few months after he was forced out of Fox News because of sexual harassment charges.

Ailes had no real experience in journalism, just as a political operative, but thanks to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by the Reagan administration, he and Rupert Murdoch felt the time was right to try and con the American people into thinking up was down, without much in the way of opposing viewpoints. Thus began the creation of Fox News in the mid-1990s.

The effect has been disastrous for the country. Millions of people have literally been living under an alternative reality, which is far removed from reality itself. Hence the continued support of millions of people for that whatever he is in the White House, despite all of the evidence he was in effect a Russian puppet.

Back to Ailes:

Roger Ailes, who shaped the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and then became a dominant, often-intimidating force in American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News, which he created with Rupert Murdoch’s money and guided for two decades until he was forced out in a sexual predation scandal, died on Thursday. He was 77.

No cause of death was given in an announcement by Mr. Ailes’s wife, Elizabeth, but he was a hemophiliac long plagued by obesity and arthritis.

“I am profoundly sad and heartbroken to report that my husband, Roger Ailes, passed away this morning,” Ms. Ailes wrote in the statement. “Roger was a loving husband to me, to his son Zachary, and a loyal friend to many.”

Maybe he was, but he certainly wasn't loved by others. He was even feared by Rupert Murdoch, the man who held the purse strings at Fox.

From the Washington Post:

As founding chief executive of Fox News in 1996, Mr. Ailes defined the channel in opposition to the traditional journalism of CNN and the liberal bent of MSNBC, and he brought Fox from a distant third to clear dominance, riding to the top along the wave of public dismay that arose over President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern.

Mr. Ailes’s reign at Fox ended abruptly in 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, after an on-air host at Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, alleged that Mr. Ailes had sabotaged her career when she refused to have sex with him. Following Carlson’s accusations, 25 other women, including Fox’s most prominent female anchor, Megyn Kelly, came forward to say that Ailes had sexually harassed them over his five decades in the TV business.

Fox’s parent company quickly pushed Mr. Ailes to resign his positions, though he said the allegations — which ranged from kissing women against their will to telling women that they had to provide him with sexual favors if they wanted their careers to flourish — were false. Mr. Ailes’ bosses, Lachlan and James Murdoch, the sons of Fox’s longtime owner, Rupert Murdoch, announced the resignation in a statement that emphasized the company’s “commitment to maintaining a work environment based on trust and respect.”

Whatever the case, Ailes was one of a kind, thank God.

It's Probably True

Fox News propagandist Roger Ailes is being sued for sexual harassment.

It isn't like he is centerfold material. Given the way women are sexualized on that network, it comes as no shock.

But Fox isn't alone.

I get really disgusted at the various cable "news" organizations employing what is in fact sex discrimination against women journalists and/or hosts by forcing them into sleeveless dresses, dresses that look like cocktail dresses rather than professional work wardrobes, ruinous high heels, even the showing of cleavage. Meanwhile, the men are dressed professionally in conservative dress with suits and ties. There is no attempt to sexualize the men. This is clear sex discrimination in dress codes. The news is not porn, and women should not be forced into porn-style attire. The women in these organizations should sue.

Getting back to the suit in question, Carlson's allegations are pretty damning.

I didn't know Carlson had been a Miss America. She held the title in 1989. This probably won her the title. She is a very good violinist. By not knowing about her beauty pageant past, you can tell I don't closely follow beauty pageants believing as I do they are relics of a sexist past.

Television News Was Dead and Buried LONG Before

Phil Donahue, who was nothing but a talk show host anyway and not a journalist, was sacked by MSNBC over his opposition to the Iraq War.

Yes, Donahue was presenting opinion, but opinion was infecting regular news broadcasts long before Donahue got sacked, and that was much more worrisome than anything done to talking heads.

Television news impartiality died long ago, with the Reagan administration's gutting of the Fairness Doctrine. Not only did talk radio do away with any duty at all in using the public airwaves to present opposing points of view (the rise of Rush Limbaugh is a direct result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine), but network news gradually dispensed with any notion of impartiality. The ultimate outrage was Rupert Murdoch's entry into the American news market with his blatantly propagandistic "Fox News Channel." He brought to America the British form of reporting (although he was Australian himself) that always presented a certain point of view, the opposite of what traditional American news organizations which at least had as their goal fairness. The British media would editorialize everywhere in its coverage, whereas American news organizations left opinion on the opinion page in newspapers or commentary segments on television that were clearly marked as such (examples for television would be Eric Severeid's or Howard K. Smith's commentaries). Murdoch, however, went further than anybody when he put a political operative, Roger Ailes, in charge of his news network. This was nothing short of an attempt to buy and shape opinion by creating a propaganda organization.

This would NEVER have happened when the Fairness Doctrine was in place.

We have been suffering from the effects of propaganda ever since.