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The launch of FOX Watch at APJ! December 11, 2002 -- PHILADELPHIA (APJP) -- In a recent issue of New York magazine, Michael Wolff posited:
It might be better, perhaps, if he asked:
You see, it isn't the White House, the House of Representatives, or the Senate that it is the beneficiary of FOX News Channel's programming. It is the men and women that occupy the board rooms and that control our elected officials that are the beneficiaries. And concomitant with that fact, it is Rupert Murdoch, a player at the global, not national, level, who is one of these board room puppeteers. After all, George W. Bush isn't smart enough, mean enough, thoughtful enough or even brash enough to come up with the garbage he does or that FOX News Channel spins 24 hours a day. No -- other people, far more intelligent, far more needy, far more greedy than he are designing his playbook, the Speaker of the House's tactics and strategy, and the Senate Majority Leader's as well. One need only glance at a recent column by Arianna Huffington (arriannaonline.com) to see it. Eli Lilly gains a free pass to kill our kids and escape liability in a piece of legislation known as the Homeland Security Agency. No one reported it. Does one have to be slammed in the head with a two-by-four to see the writing on the wall? What's going on? What is happening to our country? Is it just coincidence that the Chairman of Eli Lilly claimed that he has "no idea" how this tidbit slipped into the Homeland Security Bill? Is it mere serendipity that the pharmaceutical lobby donated four times as much campaign money to the White House and the RNC this year than they did to Democrats? Is it just a fluke that the pharma industry nearly doubled its overall contributions to politicians, largely Republicans last election cycle? Come on, world -- wake up and smell that rats! Mr. Wolff explains that FOX News Channel has become the new "psychic heart" of the Republican National Committee -- taking over for the "Christian right," which has largely disintegrated as a political force since Ralph Reed went for the gold and opened his own Atlanta-based consulting firm two years ago. But it isn't that FOX News Channel became the "psychic heart" of the RNC -- FOX News IS the heart of the RNC. It is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week infomercial for hard conservative Republicans (translation: big Business). Period. Wolff fairly instructs that politicians -- as entertainers -- reek. He calls them talentless, zeros. He then moves to Roger Ailes -- calling something about him "creepy." As one of his current victims, I couldn't have said it better. But Wolff, I think, misses the point when he offers that Ailes understands that television is all exploitation and that no matter what FOX does, or what he does personally, all Ailes need do is go on the attack. I will conceede that Wolff is accurate -- but only to a point. Yes, the Ailes-FOX News prescription for dominating the brain waves of the uninformed voter finds the bulls-eye, but Ailes is far more than a showman out to gain ratings shares -- he is a dyed-in-the-wool neofascist who on the one hand wants to be loved and to reward those who love him, and on the other stiletto-bearing hand will murder the reputation and the lives of anyone who opposes him. The talk on the street is that Ailes is a hopeless right wing fanatic ,and this misses the point deeply, adds Wolff. This is partially true, but Wolff calls Ailes's wild interest in impacting elections and public policy a mere departure or digression that is more about television craft that the meanest of power politics -- and that is a serious mistake on Wolff's part. Make no mistake. Roger Ailes was bitten by the power bug we call politics long ago in the Nixon years. He has never recovered. Yes, he has melded his twin lusts -- for television and for personal power -- but this is no digression, Mr. Wolff This is reality -- in-your-face propaganda of the highest and most destructive order. Wolff then collapses his argument by telling us that FOX News Channel is not in the service of Republicans. Yet years of research tells this writer differently. FOX News Channel is entirely in service to the Republican Party and its officials. Wolff thinks that it's FOX's ratings that drive what he calls its "convenient" ideology. But the truth is that Ailes and FOX are driving a particular and very specific ideology, just as all Murdoch-owned news properties do: the ultra right prescription for being a happy warrior -- in service, of course, to Murdoch and his ilk with no regard to national loyalty at all. Wolff argues that FOX News Channel is not really about politics, which I find amazing -- and furthermore, he argues that FOX News Channel does not argue a consistent right wing case. Yet he offers no evidence to support his claim. To my mind, FOX News Channel argues far more than a consistently right-wing case -- it argues a unswerving line of neo-nationalistic nonsense designed to support, or in Wolff-speak, "lay out," the Bush Administration and Republican congressional leadership position on everything from tax-cuts for the rich to cutting education spending to make certain each and every child is left behind. Proof of this lies in its invariable negative coverage of Senator John McCain, a moderate Republican and bragaddocio -- including the now infamous remarks of Brit Hume (FOX News Channel's chief political hack) made to self-congratulatory pip Don Imus to the effect that FOX News Channel was responsible for moving the electorate to the right and recapturing the Senate for the GOP. Wolff and others are always in the right sphere, but never seem to take the plunge into what I now call the Big Truth -- a Big Truth so unbearable that no one will believe it -- that FOX News Channel and the few other hefty sources of news have compromised themselves and become mouthpieces for corporate America, the hard right, or those on the Democrat side who would trade out with business-oriented Political Action Committees for just one more term in office. Mr. Wolff is also far too quick to accept the idea that Ailes's sidekicks and Rupert Murdoch often fall back when cornered by non-cooperative journalists asking what FOX News Channel is really about. He basically says us that FOX News Channel is (shades of Jeff "Rush Limbaugh" Christie's favorite cover) engaging in entertainment -- in an "us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, phonies versus non-phonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, established media against insurgent media." What he misses, perhaps intentionally, is that while FOX News Channel is definitely more entertaining than the CBS Evening News, it is more apparent than the crimson of a stop sign that the amusement portion of the FOX News Channel equation is nothing more than a beard hiding the true agenda of Ailes and Murdoch: pushing the Junior Bush-Corporate America line. This is so incredibly palpable because anyone can effortlessly perceive that it is just as amusing and more so to attack former Texas governor George W. Bush's "strategery" or GOP policies including tax cuts for the rich than it is to attack liberals' concerns about throwing the nation into a "holy war" in the Arabian deserts merely to protect Exxon-Mobil. One only need observe the popularity of Saturday Night Live's side-splitting mockery of George W. and his minions. FOX News Channel is not about tweaking Democrats and baby boomer culture. It is about "proving" its own virtue and the virtue of aged Republicans and the Bushes. It is not, as Wolff suggests, ridiculing the virtues of Democrats and their yuppie partisans -- although this is certainly a byproduct of FOX News Channel's spew at times. I wish Wolff had been correct. After all, it would be fun to down a dozen kielbasas with Ailes holed up behind three or four over-and-done-with martinis at Patsy's in Manhattan discussing the good old Reagan days. But the sad fact is that Ailes is not about entertainment. He about brokering power and money. He is even more evil than he appears. He is evil because he dares to deny Americans the right to make free choices based on good, complete and accurate information. This is antithetical, most completely, to everything that every Wolff, however, does lay out a good lesson plan for Democrat media players: showmanship -- great showmanship. He calls liberal jouralist Paul Krugman a "victim" -- effecting a victim's voice, and Michael Moore a comedian full of "pretty scary narcissism." Wolff also point out that Phil Donahue has been a disaster not only because he's boring but there is growinf evidence that television cannot stick with talking heads who couldn't care less about ratings and buzz. Wolff has an interesting but artificial take on why conservatives have had such success in the arena of mass media. He posits that ours is a liberal nation -- and therefore conservatives have had to develop a "more compelling and subversive story line." This sound at least erudite on its face, but the truth is that the nation today is equally split among self-described conservatives and the rest who do not vote GOP -- but includes only less than 15% of people who describe themselves as liberal or progressive. The rest of the country tends to vote Democrat -- but not for liberal reasons. And this is one problem for Democrats -- people who tend to vote for them are more difficult to target. And, to my surprise, Wolff falls into the old trap of claiming that the news media was once liberal. There is little evidence for this. The confusion here lies with the fact that journalists often self-describe as liberal -- but this is really a self-description as "thoughtful" or "educated." One only need look to the Supreme Court as an example -- so-called "conservative" justices, for example David Souter, have become awfully (at least to the RNC) liberal once on the bench for life. Why? Because liberalism, by its very nature, is most attractive to those who learn early in life, and well, that societies based merely on acquisitiveness and hoarding cannot succeed and that "love thy neighbor" is more than one part of a self-indulgent 12 step program. The American way is not "love thy neighbor by forcing him to get a job." It is "love thy neighbor despite the fact that he's not working." The news media was, if anything, too cerebral. It was not entertaining -- its programming was boring except to people who are either brainy or boring -- or both. Wolff does seem to stumble onto one important truth however: when liberals hire liberals as on-air personalities, the mission becomes neutrality, a truly "fair and balanced" situation (as FOX News Channel shamelessly taunts and sloganeers while being anything but). Yes, liberals take what they've learned in journalism school very seriously. They aim to tell the news well -- but not to spin it. "The main challenge for George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week is never to let on that he once worked for the Democrats," quips Wolff. And he's right. However, Stephanopoulos, in my opinion, engaged in the worst kind of treachery with Bill Clinton to merely feather his own nest. George Stephanopoulos is a modern day Brutus -- murdering his mentor only for personal gain. He should, by today's standards, do very well. The basic premise which Democrats and progressives must adopt is that the most important media mission is to get the message across in a far more entertaining manner. This is what the Republicans have learned so well to do. A television or radio personality cannot be a success if what he really wants is to be is a U.S. Senator or President of the United States or consultant to the President of the United States -- as is James Carville. Carville is brilliant and entertaining, but when it comes time to take the gloves off he always hesitates and weighs his client base and CNN check before going for the jugular. Carville is "vested" -- and so it goes. A television personality has to be just that -- a personality. As Wolff points out, politics and policy are just damn boring. Policy may be the most important thing in our lives overall -- but it can put you to sleep. When Tom Daschle weeps about general threats to his well-being and hints that it's Rush Limbaugh's fault, he is fair game -- and so FOX News Channel makes an ass of him. If Daschle had called Limbaugh a fat little moronic Hitler, a bigot, an apologist for bigots, and a greed-and-pilodinal-cyst-filled ass, the nation would have loved it -- and FOX News Channel wouldn't have had anywhere to go. Tom Daschle was dull Al Gore was dull as well when he attacked right wing talk radio. It just doesn't compute. As an aside, I recall writing to Bill Clinton once during the height of the so-called "impeachment hearings" -- a facade for a legislative lynch mob that entertained America between murder trials. We at American Poltiics Journal covered the tele-lyching tirelessly for months. I gave him one piece of advice: "When Kenneth Starr begins his nasty insinuations in that Now that's entertainment -- and that's what Michael Wolff is talking about. It is time for Democrats, liberals and progressives to get off their high horses, take off the gloves, and come out fighting. Forget the niceties. Forget the tenets learned in journalism 101. The age of ethics in both government and media seems to be over for the time being. Until it comes back -- if ever -- Roger Ailes has defined the playing field. Now it is high time to play.
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