.
Finally read
Loudest Voice in the Room and want to publish these notes
A lot of
us wonder how Fox News got to be such a force in the U.S. when they do such inaccurate
journalism, and the government that they are so anti- is our own United States. I learned a bit of how this happened by
reading The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman a few weeks back, and I took
notes. Now I want to share them here on
my blog, because it's a big long book, so most people won’t read it. Here are the parts that I found most
astounding:
Rupert Murdoch and a Saudi Prince
took advantage of a hole in US oversight in 1990
when they purchased their position on cable lineups across the country, "completely changing the way business is done in media," writes Sherman, with No One Paying
Attention.
Scary to me is, in this book about
Ailes, it outlines the purchase of Fox's position on American cable platforms by Murdoch, yet the book does not mention the Saudi prince who was Murdoch’s partner in creating Fox News. The source of Fox’s bulging budgets and
inordinately high salaries is always referred to as “Rupert Murdoch’s checkbook”
in this book. Even in this exhaustive
investigative journalist piece about Ailes and the founding of Fox News, there is no
mention of the Saudi prince. Yet he is second largest stockholder in Fox and
was in this deal with Murdoch from the beginning.
Why isn't Saudi Prince Alwaleed
bin Talal even mentioned in this book?
Here is
how the deal was struck that created Fox News, according Sherman in his exhaustively researched book:
Ailes changed the way cable business was done with a few meetings, lunches, and phone
calls. He “lunched with Time Warner CEO
Jerry Levin and President Richard Parson’s in Rupert Murdoch’s private dining
room” and “offered TW $125 million – more than $10 per subscriber – to carry
Fox News.”
Before
that the cable companies paid the networks for their product. Ailes used Murdoch’s checkbook to then even
lied to get the other execs to go along with it, writing them a follow-up
letter after the meeting promising “more news than talk programming” which was
exactly the opposite of what Ailes and Murdoch had been planning.
The book
calls this the “distribution coup”
Ailes
quote as they were staffing up in 1996, “most journalists are liberal, we've
got to fight that.”
Makeup Department
is a million dollar line item even when skimping on news coverage costs.
More Notes
from Loudest Voice
As the
network got off the ground in 1996, Jay Ringelstein quote: “Roger went in with an idea, so no one’s
ideas were welcome or needed, unless they were solicited.”
In same
paragraph: “It became very clear, it was Roger’s guys, and everyone else,” one
producer recalled,
Murdoch
“encouraged his executives to push boundaries and carve out their terrain and
defend it ignoring reputational concerns that normally bred caution.”
Usually
the higher up you go, the less people want to take chances, it was the opposite
at Murdoch’s News Corp. The people taking the chances were at the
top.
September
4 news conference five weeks before launch of network Ailes “introduced Fox’s
famous slogan ‘fair and balanced.’ All stories, Ailes insisted, would be ‘told
in context’ and everyone appearing on his network would be given a ‘fair shot.’
‘It's important to be first, but even more important to be fair’ a slogan he
had once developed for a hypothetical local news channel. He vowed Fox would ‘un-blur the lines between
opinion and news.’ Graphics on screen would clearly label what was ‘commentary’
and ‘opinion.’
“Proclaiming
himself as the referee” for journalists’ inherent bias
One thing Ailes and Murdoch have in common is admiration for Jerry Falwell
*****************
At that
time in the nineties, 82 percent of American people think news is biased,
negative, and boring.
He
played on that, built on that, exploited it.
Ailes
used to call CBS the Communist Broadcast System. From the start he ran Fox like a political
campaign, where winning at any length was the game, long before Murdoch was
caught with his employees hacking cell phones
“What
Ailes was selling was not news, but empowerment.” (Re; We inform, you decide,
early line used at Fox) “Fox was putting
forth the notion that their audience could come to their own conclusions, while
“feeling informed” as Chet Collier said. “Of all the lines our agency was
responsible for, this was probably the longest lived.”
“As the
network hurtled toward its October debut, some staffers were detecting the
menacing side to the culture Ailes was creating. Certain colleagues, despite their scant
journalism experience, lorded over others and could not be crossed. These Friends of Roger or F-O-R’s, were
longtime loyalists, including Collier, his assistant Suzanne Scott, Judy
Laterza, and the cadre of political operatives from Ailes Communications.
“The
influx of Ailes’s former political operatives rattled staffers. ‘I was creeped
out. I thought it was a strange group,’ said one senior producer who left soon
after the launch.
“Many
believed that Ailes was building a political operation within a television
network.
‘Even
more unnerving was a command center of networked computer terminals behind a
locked door in the basement. Entry required a special security badge, which
Ailes permitted only a handful of executives to have. “The ‘Brain Room’ ‘These guys were researching people Roger
wanted to know about. It was very Nixonian.’ A senior producer explained. Scott Ehrlich oversaw the operation. Staff and suspected that Ailes was using the
Brain Room to plan dirty tricks. Used it
to get political affiliation and real estate records of Ailes’s “enemies and
rivals”
Also
used to generate the factoids and statistics that show along the bottom of the
screen.
“The
flashing and whooshing icons would, in fact, keep the viewers hooked.”
Ehrlich:
“They suspected he was going through James Carville’s garbage when in fact he
was usually ordering pizza.”
The
Brain Room was a theater set, it turned out it was just a very well financed
research room, still referred to by guests today as, “The geniuses in the brain
room.”
Ailes never served in the military but “put himself on the front lines of a culture war.”
*********************
Ailes
never served in the military but “put himself on the front lines of a culture
war.”
Ailes:
“I consider myself a freedom fighter.”
Led to
him installing a bombproof glass window for his executive suite
Because
of the “homosexual activists”
Mass
layoffs after Clinton election
Then the
blue dress hands Fox its tour de force
On
Nine-Eleven Coverage
On Fox
an anchor asked James Inhofe “So what happens, a two-year trial or do we launch
our military might.”
Inhofe:
We launch immediately. We have a president on his way back to Washington as we
speak who is gonna be very decisive.”
(Earlier
note that stuck with me. Jerry Falwell
is the spiritual advisor to Fox. Rupert
loved him, he was one thing Ailes and Murdoch had in common.)
Ran
coverage of Nine-Eleven like a military recruiting network and
January
2002 is when “Fox passed CNN in the cable news race, and never turned back.”
The
Swift Boat
An ad
showed up, one of Hannitty’s “connections sent it.
It was a
500,000 dollar ad buy, in three states, but by Sean H putting it on screen and
making it a news story, it became a news story.
Even Dick Morris thought the swift boat story release on Hannity and
Colmes was “’stupid and dangerous.’ ”
Fox that
night brought on a panel of fellow soldiers who served with Kerry and had them
bad rap him on TV.
(In
almost exactly the same way last year they brought in a panel of soldiers who
served with Bergdahl to say he was a deserter.)
Similar
to when the Willie Horton ad showed up against Dukakis in 88
But “with
Fox News, conservatives had a twenty-four-hour network that allowed them to
inject attack lines directly into the political bloodstream.”
Greta
Van Susteren is a Democrat or at least she was at the time she went to work at
Fox
The
Swift boat thing was so out of left field and unexpected it took Kerry’s
campaign three weeks to respond, because they didn't want to give it “leg” but
no one anticipated the new power of Fox News.
- Notes from
Kay Ebeling.
This section of the book that describes the orientation employees went through as Fox prepared to launch itself as a new News Source.
onward
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