Friday, September 02, 2016

AILES IS GONE, BUT FOX WILL BE HORRIBLE UNTIL RUPERT MURDOCH DROPS DEAD

You should definitely read Gabriel Sherman's story about serial sexual predator Roger Ailes and the Fox News campaign to cover his behavior up, which included unauthorized access to a Media Matters reporter's personal phone records, plus a lot of looking the other way by Rupert Murdoch and others. We learn that Gretchen Carlson used an iPhone to tape her encounters with Ailes; if there's a just God, we'll hear those someday.

I have nothing to add to what Sherman says about this pig, but I'm struck by what we learn about the future of Fox News. Yes, Murdoch's sons want to take it in a somewhat different direction. But Daddy is still running the show, as he made clear after Ailes was let go:
Murdoch assured Ailes that, as acting CEO of Fox News, he would protect the channel’s conservative voice. “I’m here, and I’m in charge,” Murdoch told Fox staffers later that afternoon with Lachlan at his side (James had gone to Europe on a business trip).
Rupert gave the job of overseeing Fox programming to Bill Shine, an Ailes loyalist who helped Ailes manage his clearly non-consensual relationship with a subordinate, Laurie Luhn. Shine also thinks Ailes has a way with a homophobic joke:
When Ailes spotted James Murdoch on the monitor smoking a cigarette outside the office, he remarked to his deputy Bill Shine, “Tell me that mouth hasn’t sucked a cock,” according to an executive who was in the room; Shine laughed. (A Fox spokesperson said Shine did not recall this.)
There's speculation in the story that this arrangement is only temporary, and that soon, presumably after the election, things will change. The Murdoch sons don't seem to have utterly terrible ideas for the future of Fox:
According to sources, James’s preferred candidates include CBS president David Rhodes (though he is under contract with CBS through 2019); Jesse Angelo, the New York Post publisher and James’s Harvard roommate; and perhaps a television executive from London. Sources say Lachlan, who politically is more conservative than James, wants to bring in an outsider.
But Poppa appears to have his own notions of what Fox needs:
Rupert was seen giving Rebekah Brooks a tour of the Fox offices several months ago, creating speculation that she could be brought in to run Fox. Another contender is Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.
Yes, Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World during the phone-hacking scandal. (She escaped conviction.) And while Ruddy is now a Clinton pal and his website is tame these days, he was the author of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster and an inveterate conspiratorialist.

So, no, don't expect changes at Fox until Rupert kicks the bucket.

5 comments:

Leo Artunian said...

So, sometime next week then?

Victor said...

You don't change a winning (though clearly sociopathic) formula!

No, (DUMB)FUX "news" won't change.
With Ailes gone, at least there' might - MIGHT - be less sexual harassment of women:
With the exception of Bull(SHIT) O'Rally.

When Rupe croaks, maybe, MAYBE, they might move a bit off of moving the Overton Window over further to the Reich.

How ironic would it be, if t-RUMP and Ailes form their "Honey Badger Noise "news" Network," if (DUMB)FUX ended up being the moderate channel.
Not that CNN and MSNBC are liberal (ok: MSNBC has Rachel, Hayes, and Joy Reid).

Oy............

sdhays said...

It's right there in the article:

“If the money hadn’t been so good, then maybe they would have asked questions.”

“When you have an organization making that much money, we didn’t go line by line through people’s budgets."

Roger Ailes has been making $1 billion in profit for Rupert Murdoch for years, so Rupert hasn't given a rat's ass who Ailes preyed upon. He knew, or actively "didn't know". If, as a society, we were serious about making sure this crap doesn't happen, Fox would be looking at losing ten or eleven figures for this, but instead, Rupert gets to pocket his billions in profits and uncountable influence and, at most, pay a few tens of millions here and there. And the three-year statute of limitations makes sure that anything past three years is safe.

I'd like to think that at least Ailes himself will be eventually be sued out of all of his millions, but that doesn't even seem likely. Perhaps the best we can hope for is Trump TV blowing up the conservative media landscape and reducing everyone's profit margins (since hoping all conservative media dies from lack of viewers seems too much to ask...).

Feud Turgidson said...

We've been fed this load of codswallop about how the two Gen 3 Murdoch louts are 'different' from Gen 2 papa Rupe. Rupe himself was a scion of quite a horrible weasel of a media mogul, and as bad as Rupe's pa was, Rupe was worse. I fail to see why anyone should fall for this transparent propaganda aimed so clearly as assuaging UK and US regulators and Fox investors. The Fox profits are said to be in some parallel universe to the rest of the Murdoch holdings, set up so that each bundle is 'protected' from the other - meaning Fox NC money flows directly to the Murdoch family as an exemption to US, UK and Aus corporate law on fiduciary responsibility.

Does that sound like some gold-egg laying goose YOU would mess with and in doing so piss off your entire family? Again, these are MEDIA folk: they don't even have to manipulate "the press" because they ARE the press. All they have to do is keep breathing.

"So, no, don't expect changes at Fox until Rupert kicks the bucket." - or after, Steve; or after.

Blackstone said...

What Feud said (apologies to Digby)