Inside Roger Ailes’ misfiring plan to elect the next president of the United States

[TomCADem]

Source: Yahoo News

This week's must-read media feature comes from New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman, who gives us a teaser of what his upcoming book on Fox News might look like with a deeply reported, scoop-filled piece about the top-rated cable news network's chairman, Roger Ailes. Among other things, Sherman's piece spells out Ailes's designs on engineering the outcome of the 2012 election.

Ailes wields sweeping influence over the Republican party. The conservative media titan has spent the past several years pumping up a slate of potential 2012 presidential nominees, such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who have enjoyed lucrative salaries and priceless exposure as paid talking heads on his network.

But even as Fox continues to crush its competitors in the cable news ratings and generates enormous revenue for parent company News Corporation (to the tune of $900 million in 2010) Ailes' mission to install the next president of the United States seems to be unraveling.

"It must have been disturbing to Ailes when the wheels started to come off Fox's presidential-circus caravan," Sherman writes. "With an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates' poll numbers remain dismally low. ... Ailes's candidates-in-­waiting were coming up small. And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative--he wanted to elect a president."


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110523/ts_yblog_thecutline/inside-roger-ailes-misfiring-plan-to-elect-the-next-president-of-the-united-states

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Interesting excerpts are coming out about a new book on Fox News and Roger Ailes' efforts to hand pick the 2012 GOP presidential candidate. Indeed, Fox News' efforts to throw its prior future presidents on payroll under the bus in favor of 2008 retread Mitt Romney reflects an effort by Fox News to distance itself from its prior efforts to overtly control the GOP field by hiring Sarah Palin, Huckabee, and Gingrich.

What is also amazing is that despite Fox's complaints about access, Fox News was essentially refusing to return WH efforts to arrange for an interview despite the efforts of Major Garret to engineer a detente of sorts.

[kestrel91316]

1. Who elected Mr. Ailes kingmaker?? He gets ONE VOTE, just like all the rest of us.

[Iliyah]

3. And judging

from some gopers about being over weight, you can't get on the plane NOR get doctor's care. F him and fake news.

[Old and In the Way]

2. Poor Ailes.

He's got the money and he's got the propaganda vehicle/network to market it. What he doesn't have is a popular political agenda or the candidates to deliver it.

[notadmblnd]

4. look at this, way down at the end.

A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he'd invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes's calls to run. Ailes had also hoped that David Petraeus would run for president, but Petraeus too has decided to sit this election out, choosing to stay on the counterterrorism front lines as the head of Barack Obama's CIA. The truth is, for all the antics that often appear on his network, there is a seriousness that underlies Ailes's own politics. He still speaks almost daily with George H. W. Bush, one of the GOP's last great moderates, and a war hero, which especially impresses Ailes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110523/ts_yblog_thecutline/inside-roger-ailes-misfiring-plan-to-elect-the-next-president-of-the-united-states

[ThoughtCriminal]

5. Nothing but buffoons left

It must have seemed like magic for so many years.