Has Roger Ailes Hacked American Phones for Fox News?

[stockholmer]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162016/has-roger-ailes-hacked-american-phones-fox-news


Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?” That’s how Portfolio.com began a post http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/mixed-media/2008/01/10/fox-news-knocks-down-brain-room-claim/#ixzz1Ru7kDewX back in 2008, when a former Fox News executive charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured “brain room” in Fox’s New York headquarters for “counterintelligence” and may have used it to hack into private phone records.

All this week people have been looking for links between the Murdoch empire’s burgeoning phone-hacking scandal in Britain and News Corp.’s sprawling political/communications juggernaut in the United States. The links so far include a former New York City cop alleging http://www.mirror.co.uk/2011/07/11/phone-hacking-9-11-victims-may-have-had-mobiles-tapped-by-news-of-the-world-reporters-115875-23262694/ that Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World offered to pay him to hack into 9/11 victims’ phone records, and a News Corp. US shareholders’ suit in Delaware already targeting the company for nepotism adding British phone hacking http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/11/us-newscorp-lawsuit-idUSTRE76A3LN20110711 as evidence of a corporate culture “run amuck.”

But rumors have floated in the press and on the Internet about possible phone hacking in that special-security-clearance-only bunker at Fox HQ for years.


Dan Cooper was one of the people who helped create the Fox News channel with Roger Ailes, and was fired in 1996. In 2008, Cooper wrote http://www.dancooper.tv/NakedLaunch.htmon his website that David Brock (now head of Media Matters) had used him as an anonymous, on-background-only source for an Ailes profile he was writing for New York magazine. Before the piece was published, on November 17, 1997, http://books.google.com/books?id=xOgCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=david+brock+published+%22new+york+magazine%22+1997&source=bl&ots=mJjmrT4lZY&sig=AgbL7ikvsUmXFWzEpYZMtB35Fys&hl=en&ei=EvUcTqLVEvS30AHnsbnuBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFIQ6A Cooper claims that his talent agent, Richard Leibner, told him he had received a call from Ailes, who identified Cooper as a source, and insisted that Leibner drop him as a client--or any client reels Leibner sent Fox would pile up in a corner and gather dust. Cooper continued:

snip

[checks-n-balances]

1. I wouldn't be surprised at anything that man would do

That was one of my first thoughts on hearing about the Murdoch scandal. Almost nothing shocks me any more.

[tularetom]

2. Does Dolly Parton have large breasts?

I would be very surprised to find out he hasn't done so.

Furthermore I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that he has used some of the information he gleaned from phone hacking to blackmail politicians.

And finally it would not come as a complete shock to me to learn that fear of potential blackmail is what has caused some of our congressional and administration Democrats to become invertebrates.

[RainDog]

3. it would be pretty sweet if we could get rid of Fox News b/c of this scandal n/t

[MADem]

5. That's my hope....maybe someone sane will buy it and turn it into something that does not smell! nt

[peacetalksforall]

4. I should probably be commenting on the 'brain room', Brock, Cooper, etc. but....

my mind went to two questions I've been holding-

. why did Hillary Clinton meet with Murdoch? (Around the time of her campaign for the Presidency?)

. Does Breitbart have a connection to FOX?

[JDPriestly]

6. Great questions

[diane in sf]

7. Of course, probably with a full compliment of blackmail.

[donheld]

8. Anybody read the Rolling Stone article on Roger Ailes would know

He's done it since day one.

[spanone]

9. yum....yum...gets better with every. passing day