Monk

Fox News like to sell themselves as the patriotic news channel - America's news channel. Well, they just revealed the name of a member of the Navy SEAL team that conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and now al-Qaida knows too! Al-Qaida has posted the picture and the name on its websites and is effectively announcing a super-fatwa on the man's life. One of Fox's executives, John Moody, has only this to say, "“Once you write a book, anonymously or not, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.” The SEAL member has written a book under a pseudonym detailing the raid. It's true that fiction can not match the craziness of fact.

(Source: News-LJ)

It's well acknowledged throughout the media world that female Fox News anchors are typically more, er, coiffed than their liberal counterparts. There are YouTube videos dedicated to Fox women's short skirts, a fully functioning website called www.FoxNewsGirls.com and Allure once penned a feature declaring, "With its bevy of babes, the network should be called the Foxy News Channel."

-- ONTD

Ah, yes! I think they have actually tamed down the sex appeal in recent years, at least as far as short skirts and 'leg shows' and panty-peeks go. Oh, but I remember the early years! I was addicted to their news casts. I would even tape them to watch them later in slow motion or in freeze-frame.

I fondly remember Linda Vester, too, a pretty blonde who did not mind working her legs. I remember when they would take calls from the audience, and a male viewer would pantingly comment to her about her sexy legs, and she would just smile brightly and express what sounded like sincere gratitude, very flirty.

I suppose it is a good thing that they don't really do that anymore, because I probably wouldn't be able to resist watching, and, frankly, the day is too short for such hollow diversions.

We know that Fox News is a Republican propaganda machine, and we can guess how its head, Roger Ailes, made it that way, but I came across a good quote from an extensive article on the subject, and the colorful detail is worth keeping.

_ _ _

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”


[...]

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn’t far enough to the right for his tastes, he’d spring an accusation: “Why are you a liberal?” If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. As recounted by journalist Scott Collins in Crazy Like a Fox, the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. “All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom,” says a former anchor. “But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color – and that your color was red.” Red state, that is.

-- Tim Dickinson, "How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory" at Rolling Stone Magazine

This article on the aggressive corporate culture of Rupert Murdoch's world is more than a few days old, but you know how hectic my social life can be, and it's not like the Murdoch drama is over.

_ _ _

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

...

Even as the flames of the scandal begin to edge closer to Mr. Murdoch’s door, anybody betting against his business survival will most likely come away disappointed. He has been in deep trouble before and not only survived, but prospered. The News Corporation’s reputation may be under water, but the company itself is very liquid, with $11.8 billion in cash on hand and more than $2.5 billion of annual free cash flow.

Still, money will fix a lot of things, but not everything. When you throw money onto a burning fire, it becomes fuel and nothing more.

-- David Carr for The New York Times

Murdoch. The end of your global media domination is nigh. Be afraid!

-- LulzSec

Apparently one of Murdoch's papers was hacked by LulzSec, a notorious hacking group, to make it look like there was a report about Murdock committing suicide. The above quote was tagged onto this piece of mindfuck.

What makes this all the more intriguing is that, not long before this, we have a real story about the whistleblower to this hacking scandal being found genuinely dead:

News of the World phone hacking whistleblower found dead

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: "At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

"The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing."

Not thought to be suspicious, eh? Why do I feel this is the kind of police work we can expect to continue to find in this Establishment-shaking affair.

I knew this jolt to the Murdoch empire was a big deal, but I didn't know things were going to get this wild.

(Additional Source: New York Magazine)

"We've got to get rid of the fear of failure in this country. In America, people start things, fail and shake themselves down and start things again. The animal spirit of capitalism is stronger there."

-- Rupert Murdoch

That quote came just before the big hacking scandal that has taken down Murdoch's News of the World newspaper and undermined his deal to take over BSkyB, which I take it would have been bigger in Britain than Fox News in America. Indeed, the article is headlined "Thank God for Rupert Murdoch" congratulating him for the BSkyB deal.

How quickly things can change, eh? It goes against my idea that the rich and powerful get it all their way and can even get away with murder. Appaently, we are not that bad off, yet. There still can be a little too much of that animal spirit.

I was going to use that quote at the top for one of my 'daily quotes' post, but decided against such capitalist triumphalism. Let some one else, some Ayn Randian libertarian blow that trumpet! But now I think it's worth keeping for my blog, heh.

_ _ _

Never apologize. Never back down. Never lose.

That’s the sort of advice that has long nurtured the super-powerful type-A humans who run the world’s armies and empires. But after nearly two weeks of an unfolding scandal that has set Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation reeling — revelations of reporters hacking the phones of murder and terrorism victims, their families and even British law enforcement and government — such tough-minded philosophies appear to have faded into the distance. Both Murdoch and his son James are to appear before Parliament next week. And in the United States, the F.B.I. is set to open an inquiry into whether News Corporation journalists sought to gain access to the phone records of victims of the 9/11 attacks.

-- Peter Catapano for The New York Times

I tune in to “Fox and Friends Weekend” to see if the infobabe is working the ratings in a little mini-skirt this morning, but she is not. Instead, I catch a report on the plan to build a mosque for Muslims, on the very site that held the World Trade Center before it was bombed to the ground on 9/11 by Muslim terrorists.

Some say it is outrageous to even consider the proposal, rewarding Islamist terrorism in this way. By their lights, what could be a better example of the cultural suicide of the West than this abject ass-kissing of those that beat you down? They can imagine the joking and laughter of Osama and company, “If this is what they mean by ‘turning the other cheek’, I’m all for it, ha ha! Maybe if we kill 10,000 Americans, they will make Islam America’s national religion, ha ha!”

On the other side, which seems to be the dominant side of the debate, people raise the important distinction between Islamism and Islam, between terrorists and earnest, peaceful Muslims. They argue that America can best show its strength by not losing sight of this distinction, and by not letting itself be brought down to a base level by a fringe group of militant radicals.

Personally, I philosophically love the argument for going ahead with the mosque, but I have read too much on how militants seem to have a fairly easy way of co-opting Muslim institutions, including mosques. The idea, of providing a possible foothold for militants at the site of their greatest terrorist exploit, sounds questionable to me. Surely, someone can come up with a better idea.

Of course, we do have our Islamophobes and terror hysterics, and I should not have been surprised when I saw a Fox anchor charging that the Obama administration is “legitimizing jihad” by supporting the proposal to build the mosque. Fox has long held up the banner of the right-wing fringe, painting Obama as a Kenyan terrorist who somehow managed to heist the presidency, destroying America from within through increasing dosages of socialism, while at the same time opening the gates for the jihadists - the Trojan Black Man.

This is what I get for tuning in to Fox, even though I was only interested in eyeing some creamy white thighs. Should I be punished because I cannot afford a subscription to “Naked News” on the Internet? I guess this is what you get when you go looking for love in all the wrong places.

_ _ _

I gave Fox too much credit. It turns out that the propopsed mosque is not at ground zero, but a couple of blocks away. You have to be double wary when watching propaganda programs. I should make a point of keeping the volume turned off when I am watching Fox News, which I consider to be my soft-porn channel.

The rise of the Teabaggers is a story that has legs and will live with us for a while. It is an elite-driven movement that apparently resonates with a lot of real folks, or at least with those people who probably could have been identified with the conservative base in the first place - white, fundamentalist, and proud - including a lot of people inclined to be excitable about an uppity black president who is supposedly destroying everything that is true and beautiful and American in the world.

Matthew Yglesias notes that it was not unusual during the Dubya years to get notes and screeds from people that purported to show America was being turned into a fascist society under the Republicans. Who would deny that there was a lot of Bush-hate and even fear of a Fourth Reich? But he goes on to argue that there seems to be something different going on with these right-wing demonstrations:

Overreaction to policies you don’t like is a pretty understandable human impulse. The difference is that mainstream, prominent outlets usually try to restrain that kind of impulse. But this sort of over-the-top rhetoric isn’t burbling from the grassroots up, it’s being driven the very most prominent figures in conservative media and also by a large number of members of congress.

Of course, we are largely talking about Fox News. Those of us in the reality-based community, for whom facts and logic still hold pride of place in our philosophy, understand that there is some question about Fox News being categorized as a center of serious journalism.

Quoting David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who has become disenchanted with conservative politics of late, “Yet to listen to Fox News and other conservative media, you’d think we were living in Czechoslovakia in the final hours before the 1948 communist coup.”

Unfortunately, as easy as it is to mock Fox News, they do dominate in the ratings for cable news. Even I watch Fox News about as much as I watch the others, though I do so because their info-babes wear short skirts and Fox is not too shy about showing off those sexy gams. More happily, these cable news outlets, including CNN and the more liberal MSNBC, as well as Fox News, still only constitute a very small universe. Most of us are apparently watching reality TV shows or ESPN sports shows, or else we are surfing the Net.

I have also heard rumors that some people actually have real lives, go figure! They must be the good-looking people.

Nevertheless, it is often the intensity of interest that trumps other factors in democratic politics. Obama has had his fervent fans and admirers, but they do not seem to really match the intensity of the gun-toting, right-wing fanatic who believes that he has Jesus in his heart and Thomas Jefferson by his side and Rush Limbaugh as his commanding general.

♠
October 9, 2007 -- CHRISTIAN "media watchdog group" The Resistance is all worked up over the ultra-femme anchors of Fox News. The group's leader, Mark Dice, rants in an e-mail, "I see shorter skirts on the women of Fox News than I do on the prostitutes being arrested on cop shows." Fox responded, "We're always flattered to have everyone talking about us in one form or another."

-- New York Post, Page Six



It has been better, but it does look like Fox News has loosened up a little, again. It was getting a bit prim and prudish there for awhile. It is not hawt enough for me to want to tune in regularly again, but I do check it out from time to time to see if it may get better yet.

xXx

♠
People will bemoan what Murdoch does to the Journal, no matter what it is. They will say that he is killing a great newspaper. But the sad part of this story is that "the empire," as we reporters once liked to call it, was already dying -- and that so many of its wounds were self-inflicted.

-- David Ignatius for The Washington Post

Rupert Murdoch got the Wall Street Journal, confirming definitively that he is a man who gets what he wants. There were reports of a snag and struggle not long before the deal was closed, and one can only imagine what pressures were applied, but the big man won.

David Ignatius used to report for that paper, and he has an interesting account of some of the history, pointing out that the Journal had been getting more ideologically opinionated since the mid-eighties, suggesting that Murdoch may not be so much a revolutionary change but one just bringing a tragic-drama to its natural conclusion.

And just like we have CNN and Fox News, now we have The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. It would seem that we have become more polarized and less given to the idealism of a pure objectivity. Let the debates go on and long live democracy!

( Ignatius )

xXx