How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525?page=1

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network


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.”

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

More at the link --

because it's about authoritarianism, not conservatism or free markets.

Roger Ailes does what passes for thinking on behalf of the dittoheads.

Ailes
Limbaugh
Rove

I haven't heard of any liberals who have similar influence over the country's political views.

Shit this is frustrating!

WHAT level playing field?

:mad: :grr:

Piers MORGAN how she and Donnie went on a shopping network and everything was so scripted that Donnie burst playfully at the restrictions and grabbed one of the dresses for sale and started modeling it, and Marie pooh-poohed the lack of sponteneity ("good television") because the producers blacked out his antics and stuck to the scripted stogginess.

Anyway, I would watch Jane HALL and Eric BURNS squirm every week on News Watch or whatever the ripoff of Reliable Sources was.

* It took ten years for Jane HALL to "begin to feel uncomfortable" with the bias?!1 How could anybody *that* perceptive be any kind of talking head anywhere else?!1

* Tweety (Chris MATTHEWS) sprung from AILES?!1: "He (AILES) became the head of CNBC, America’s top business network. In his three years as boss, he more than quintupled profits and minted stars like Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo."

* The reference to Shrub's "NEGLIGENCE" ahead of 9-11 comes off as SO matter of fact. If it is SO accepted, why isn't he rotting in a cell?!1 Sigh.