"Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of... 'The Fall: The End of Fox News,' which is to hit shelves next week..."

"... days after Murdoch, 92, announced his retirement from the Fox Corporation and News Corporation boards. [The book] paints Fox’s owner as embarrassed by the channel’s vulgarity and horrified by its ultimate political creation, Donald Trump. Murdoch apparently very much wants to thwart the ex-president.... Though 'The Fall' is peppered with references to HBO’s 'Succession,' Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. 'He just wants his kids to love him,' Roger Ailes is quoted saying. 'And they don’t.'... ... Murdoch has... handed Fox to his son Lachlan... widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs.... The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.... The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Ludicrous Agony of Rupert Murdoch" (NYT).

I have a thing about headlines that begin with the word "how."

You may remember my post from last December, "How the word "how" has become the most deceptive word in the history of headlines": "I'm sure some 'how' headlines sit atop articles that really explain how to do something, but I must cry out against the infestation of 'how' in headlines." 

Since it is my self-imposed task to be on the alert for "how" headlines, I must bring you this from today's Washington Post: "How the forces inside the GOP that pushed out John Boehner led to Matt Gaetz." 

I doubt that this piece (by Paul Kane) is really going to tell me how these "forces" led somewhere. I expect to find only an assertion that the moderates who used to have the GOP under control have lost their grip. But I'll give Kane a chance. Show me the forces and show me how they "led to Matt Gaetz" (whatever that means).

Reading, I see Kane is reviewing Boehner's memoir, which, Kane admits up front, hasn't got one word about Matt Gaetz. 

Boehner writes about his distaste for immoderate politicos within both parties: They are self-promoters who "claim to be true believers and purists, like the right-wing Freedom Caucus or the left-wing Squad, but really they are just political terrorists." There were always people like that in Congress, and Boehner supposedly wanted to tame them.

Kane writes: 

"Carlson sued Ailes for sexual harassment in 2016, forcing him to resign (before his death), and busted a dam which saw a flood of women step forward who claimed..."

"... they too were harassed by the cable network news chief. Carlson settled with 21st Century Fox for a reported $20M. Kelly also admitted that she was sexually harassed by Ailes. She wrote about those advances in her 2016 book Settle for More. HarperCollins reportedly paid Kelly $10M-plus for the book" (Deadline).

A nicely minimalist trailer:

The day in disgust.

What's been disgusting people in the last 24 hours? I wondered, after blogging something that disgusted Meade and me and noticing the the new post went on top of yesterday's post about Comey being "just completely disgusted" when Trump subjected him to a handshake.

Here's what I've come up with:

1. The avolatte. "Yes, this is a latte served inside of an avocado. Look at it. It’s sickening."

2. What's that white thing that seems to be growing out of your child's gums? It's not some weird new disease, just some fingernail bitings. One woman — who ultimately tweezed out 27 shreds — made video of her adventure in her son's mouth and posted it on Facebook. The son's name — if this is relevant to analyzing her level of vigilance about health matters — is Kale.

3. "If Trump took a dump on his desk, you would defend it," said Anderson Cooper last night to his guest Jeffrey Lord.

4. In Japan, promoting the movie "Tokyo Ghoul," there's a Tokyo Ghoul café. Here's the website for the café with some pictures from the comic book and the dishes intended to evoke them. (Here's a trailer for the new movie.)

5. I avoided the hoo-ha over the men's romper, but maybe I can catch the wave on the jeado. "Real men wear speedos, but it takes a confident man to wear a jeado."

6. "It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides."

7. From "'Alien' Is Sci-Fi Horror's Most Feminist Movie Franchise," by Tom Seymour: "The Alien movies visualize the two things so many men look upon with disgust and horror—getting penetrated themselves, and watching a woman giving birth... In the Alien films... moments of rape are always moments of impregnation. They provide a dual, intensified horror."

8. From "As Indians, we take our cotton heritage too lightly": "Remember the outrage last year in the US when an Indian supplier of 'Egyptian cotton' bedsheets to major department stores was found to have used other cotton? The disgust and horror was akin to sturgeon caviar being found to have been diluted with dyed salmon roe or horsemeat being detected in so-called beef products in UK. But how many know that India also produces... an equally wonderful ESL cotton variety, albeit rather unimaginatively named Suvin, the result of a 'marriage' of a local cotton gal 'Sujatha' with a Caribbean cotton lad called St Vincent in the mid-1970s?"

9. "Where do we draw the line on sledging?" I don't know. I had to figure out what "sledging" even is. Fortunately, there's an entire Wikipedia article on this cricket-specific issue: "Sledging is a term used in cricket to describe the practice whereby some players seek to gain an advantage by insulting or verbally intimidating the opposing player.... There is debate in the cricketing world as to whether this constitutes poor sportsmanship or good-humoured banter."

10. "Found this while doing yard work. My brother asked why women would buy baseball themed pads."

Roger Ailes has died.

WaPo had a big obituary ready to go. Excerpt:

As founding chief executive of Fox News in 1996, Mr. Ailes defined the channel in opposition to the traditional journalism of CNN and the liberal bent of MSNBC, and he brought Fox from a distant third to clear dominance, riding to the top along the wave of public dismay that arose over President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern.

Mr. Ailes’ reign at Fox ended abruptly in 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, after an on-air host at Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, alleged that Mr. Ailes had sabotaged her career when she refused to have sex with him. Following Carlson’s accusations, 25 other women, including Fox’s most prominent female anchor, Megyn Kelly, came forward to say that Ailes had sexually harassed them over his five decades in the TV business....

In 1996, Murdoch — who concluded when he first met Mr. Ailes that “Either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen” — asked him to launch a conservative alternative to CNN. But Fox News Channel would not tout itself as conservative because, as Mr. Ailes said, “if you come out and you try to do right-wing news, you’re gonna die. You can’t get away with it.”

Instead, Mr. Ailes proposed to build a “fair and balanced” news operation in which reporting would blend with largely conservative talk show hosts.

This is exactly what I thought should happen: Tucker Carlson gets the Fox News time slot vacated by Megyn Kelly.

I should have blogged it. Then I could exult in my prescience. Here's the news from Drudge:

TUCKER NEW CABLE KING/GETS 9 PM FOXNEWS...

The dramatic move caps Carlson's rapid rise at the nation's top-rated cable channel.

"Tucker has already proven to be an audience powerhouse at 7 PM, now sky is the limit!" an insider explains. ... In recent weeks, the Carlson show hit #1 audience and demo with a mix of explosive interviews and hard-hitting topics.

Carlson totally deserves this. They gave him an early slot and he knocked himself out making it as exciting as he could. He replaced Brit Hume who was just filling in after Greta Van Susteren left suddenly. Hume coasted amiably, doing his grumpy but mellow old man routine. Here's how he acted on election night. That's peak excitement from Hume.

I'm charmed by Hume's demeanor, and Carlson annoys me. But Carlson operates by being irritating. I've said this before. He deliberately antagonizes his guests by being an annoying man. That's how he manufactures a show, and it's not easy. He's won an audience doing that and he has thereby earned the time slot upgrade.

I think there was an assumption out there that a woman would be chosen to replace Megyn Kelly.  Fox News has its woman problem, but would that problem be solved by finding the best woman they've got and leaping her over the go-getter, high-performing Tucker Carlson? I don't think so. Fox has entered its new era, post-Roger Ailes.* And it should operate in a new way. Giving Carlson what he deserves is a good start. Give Carlson's slot to a woman and challenge her to prove her worth, the way Carlson did.

And I'm saying all this as a woman and a woman who finds Carlson very annoying. (And I do record his show and attempt to watch it until he annoys me too much.)
_____________________________

* I'm not going to get back into the Ailes matter, but here's "The Revenge of Roger’s Angels/How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media."

"The reason men resort to the ‘nuts and sluts’ defense is because it may be the only way to undermine the credibility of a woman who is not, in fact, telling the truth."

Said Susan Estrich, defending Bill Clinton in 1998. Estrich — a prominent lawprof politico — had herself coined the term "nuts and sluts" back in 1991 to characterize attacks on the woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Estrich is now defending Roger Ailes. Does that add up?

Here's Alessandra Stanley in the NYT with "The Curious Case of Susan Estrich":

For many years, Ms. Estrich was a lively liberal commentator on Fox News... Ms. Estrich described Mr. Ailes...  as a close friend.

“In the 18 years I was at Fox News, Roger has never told me what to say, what to do or what to wear,” Ms. Estrich said. “He kept me on the payroll for seven months when I was too sick to work.”...

Ms. Estrich, a partner in the Los Angeles office of the litigation firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said that she first heard the allegations against Mr. Ailes on her return from London, and that by the time she got to her apartment there were 10 messages from her old friend on her home voice mail. She didn’t hesitate to take the case, aware that some feminists say that she sold out.

“It is painful, but at the same time I am a lawyer: Once she takes on a case she stands by her client,” Ms. Estrich said in a phone interview. “Roger needs someone to help him through this extremely difficult process. The last thing any client needs is a lawyer sitting in judgment.”

She's a lawyer. A lawyer and a politico and a media personality and a feminist. It's hard doing all these things. But when you do them all, you lose the ability to leverage your status as a feminist to vouch for somebody. If you want to stand aloof from the fray so you can palm off your judgments as cruelly neutral, you can try to do that. It's a different kind of life. Nothing really "curious" about these choices.

Greta Van Susteren is leaving Fox News... immediately.

Announced the same day as Fox News's settlement of the sexual harassment case filed by Gretchen Carlson. The case was about things done by Roger Ailes, and Van Susteren had defended Ailes.

Van Susteren was said to be one of the FNC on-air talent who had a clause in their contact to walk if Ailes left the net....

Does that mean she quit or was fired? We're only told that contract negotiations stalled. Opaque.

Brit Hume takes over the show, beginning tonight.

"That Trump knows he's gonna lose. All Trump is doing is setting up a future media empire to take on Fox News and CNN."

"This is the CNN theory. That when Trump loses the election, he's gonna have Steve Bannon and Ailes and they're gonna set up this brand-new news network to take everybody else out. They're gonna swamp Fox News. They're gonna swamp CNN. That's the CNN theory. I know some of the players here. I've not heard a word of that. I can't do thumbs up or thumbs down on it. I have no idea whether any of that has any truth to it, if there's any validity. I do know that CNN's off the rails on this. They're acting paranoid and they've got their conspiratorial hats on and they're dreaming and imagines things."

Said Rush Limbaugh on his show today. I'm trying to think about what's so paranoid about that theory. It makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.

Here's an article in RedState, "Looking Ahead: Trump, Ailes, Bannon And Hannity – News Network On The Horizon?":

With Trump bringing aboard Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon to the campaign, it is not out of the realm of possibility that long term plans include a cable news station....

Trump has been floating this for some time. He believes he's providing ratings for other outlets and not being able to collect on any of it. That would all change if he slapped his name on a news network. The best part for Trump is he wouldn't have to do any of the heavy lifting. Roger Ailes dismissal from Fox News gives Trump access to the man who created the most successful cable news station on the air....

There’s a reason Breitbart News went from hard-charging news outlet to drooling Trump mouthpiece. Bannon emerges from all of this unscathed. ... If Trump wins, he’s in a position of high power; if Trump loses, Bannon could head up a new media empire with Trump’s support and the involvement of new Trump supporter and ousted former Fox News head Roger Ailes.

Post-Roger Ailes, Fox News should redo its overly overly made-up blondes...

... in the style of Ivanka Trump.

It's a simple upgrade and modernization.

"I look at Roger, it’s like 'Mad Men.' This guy came of age in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s when it was a whole different culture."

"I don’t think he was thinking that [what he was saying] was really all that bad."

Said an unnamed former Fox News executive, quoted in a WaPo article titled "The fall of Roger Ailes: He made Fox his ‘locker room’ — and now women are telling their stories."

Ailes... succeeded in obliterating his main rival, CNN, in the ratings and making huge profits. He also pushed for a very specific look: blond and leggy. Television had long been the realm of perfectly coiffed commentators and anchors, but under Ailes, Fox seemed to be taking the ethos to another level.

“Generally, women accept that at Fox you are expected to wear skirts [and] dresses and that the makeup people are going to slather it on and make you look like a bimbo,” said a former frequent guest commentator. One time, the former commentator said, higher-ups at the network reprimanded makeup artists for putting her on-air without false eyelashes, even though she hated wearing them.

A late-night anchor boasted about the “leg chair” on his set, where the audience could get a full view of the on-air talent’s legs.

“From the very beginning, Roger wanted attractive women, translucent desks,” a prominent early staffer said in an interview. The message from Ailes was unmistakable, the former staffer said: “I want to see her legs. I want the viewers to see their legs. I want people to watch Fox News even if the sound is turned down.”

What happens to Fox News now that its trademark style has become connected, in the minds of viewers, with the sexual exploitation of women in the grossest form (the executive punishing or rewarding employees based on their response to his demands for sexual access)? Do those overly made-up blondes seem different and creepy now that you know the allegations against Ailes? Or was what was on screen always overtly sexual, following a longstanding sex-sells formula that everyone already knew about that stands separate and distinct from any behind-the-scenes sexual transactions?

Does Fox News look different to you now?

No, I always disliked the sexualized presentation of women.

No. It's just a simple thing to like looking at pretty women.

Yes. It seemed lightheartedly sexy and now it's dirty-old-man sexy.

Yes. The presentation of women always bothered me, but now bothers me more.

 

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"If Roger Ailes were how he's described, there's no way I would've stuck around. I don't feel like putting up with that stuff and I wouldn't."

"Even if he weren't doing it to me, I wouldn't want to work in that environment. I sort of feel bad for Gretchen Carlson because it's sort of a weird thing that she's done. What she's alleging is something that is alien to me. I've never heard it."

Said Greta Van Susteren.

"I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better."

Said Roger Ailes to Gretchen Carlson, according to her sexual harassment lawsuit.

Whose leg felt that thrill?

The NYT book review of Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Roger Ailes, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," is written by Janet Maslin, who trashes the book, but not because she likes Ailes. It's that Sherman failed to get the goods on Ailes.

I just want to focus on one sentence:

The second half of “The Loudest Voice in the Room” is mostly devoted to recent and familiar news, beginning with the moment Fox began getting thrills up its leg over Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky debacle. 

Come on. MSNBC owns the expression "thrill up my leg." Even though the Bill-and-Monica story had lots of sex and Fox News may have been eager to cover it, the eagerness didn't arise out of a vector of thrill going toward the groin. The journalistic enthusiasm described as a "thrill up my leg" came from Chris Matthews and he was titillated not by anybody's sexual activities but by the speechifying of Barack Obama.



That's on the list of nominees for most ridiculous, embarrassing thing ever said on a TV news show, and we're never going to forget it. Have at Fox News, perhaps by mocking some schoolboy furtively masturbatory outburst if you can, but if you talk of thrills up a leg, that leg is attached to MSNBC.

Etymological sidenote: The original meaning of "debacle" — used above in the phrase "getting thrills up its leg over Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky debacle" — was, according to the (unlinkable) OED "A breaking up of ice in a river; in Geol. a sudden deluge or violent rush of water, which breaks down opposing barriers, and carries before it blocks of stone and other debris." The figurative meaning is: "A sudden breaking up or downfall; a confused rush or rout, a stampede." Yes, it's a dead metaphor, but it goes nicely with blowjobs, don't you think? Not that Bill ever was icy.

Did Roger Ailes offer a TV producer an extra $100 each week "if you agree to have sex with me whenever I want"?

That's what Randi Harrison said happened, back in the 1980s, when Ailes was at NBC, according to “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” a 560-page biography of Ailes by Gabriel Sherman. The book also relates an anecdote from the 90s in which Ailes probably used "an obscene phrase with the words 'little' and 'Jew'" in speaking about some rival executive at NBC.

ADDED: The author says he did 614 interviews. Consider those 2 anecdotes — from 20 and 30 years ago — in that context. Not much of a portrait of evil, even assuming the stories are true!

The offer of $100 is a bad joke. If he'd really wanted to buy sexual access to an employee he'd have offered a lot more or offer it per encounter. Who would agree to step up to a sexual encounter whenever the other person "wants" it? Maybe you can get your spouse onto that arrangement — and I think you should try! — but that's not something you can buy… not since the days when you could buy a slave.

And as far as the anti-Semitic remark, it was directed at a particular individual, not an expression of an actual opinion about the group (even if it's some evidence of his view of the group). Ailes had a longstanding battle with one guy, and one time, that hostility manifested itself in a reference to his enemy's religion/ethnicity. 614 interviews produced no other anti-Semitic remark? That's actually rather strong evidence that he's not anti-Semitic.

"I have a soft spot for Joe Biden. I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray."

Said Roger Ailes. He also said: "I like Marco Rubio.... But I don’t know about as a vice-presidential candidate. He’s a nice guy, and that role requires kicking the crap out of your opponents.

"My doctor told me that I’m old, fat, and ugly, but none of those things is going to kill me immediately..."

"The actuaries say I have six to eight years. The best tables give me 10. Three thousand days, more or less.... I’m ready. Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there’s something bigger than us.... I don’t think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I’m at peace. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family."

Said Roger Ailes the head of Fox News.  

I wonder what people of the left will say when he dies. Will we get the kind of "hell has a new resident" crude clichés we're hearing today from righties celebrating the departure of Hugo Chavez?

HBO drops Roger Ailes TV movie because it "could never be seen as objective."

That's their asserted reason. They cite their "CNN affiliation," which would supposedly interfere with their presentation of a movie that was being executive produced by MSNBC.

The HBO movie would have been based on the upcoming manuscript by media writer Gabriel Sherman who has written two cover stories for New York magazine on Ailes and Fox News, including his mammoth article “The Elephant In The Green Room” which prompted complaints from the Fox News CEO.

How can the reason be true? It it were true, they wouldn't have started the project in the first place.

The news of dropping the project comes after Nikki Finke revealed that it existed, saying:

HBO appears obsessed by GOP Conservatives. There have been movies about the 2000 Bush vs Gore election standoff and Sarah Palin and most recently a TV series featuring George W Bush’s severed head. Now HBO has done a secret deal for an Untitled Roger Ailes Project....

Roger Ailes answers critics who say the women he puts on Fox News are mostly blonde.

"When women get into television, they dye their hair blonde."

Something about TV and blondness, apparently. But what?

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, and there were no women newsreaders on TV or radio, a high school teacher explained to the class that women could not be hired for these positions because their high-pitched voices simply did not work properly in broadcasting. A male voice was — to use a contemporary employment law term — a bona fide occupational qualification. He said it with utmost seriousness and authority, like it was science, and though it made me feel angry and rebellious, I believed him. Something about the technical equipment, which is another thing only the males can handle.

The answer: The NYT doesn't get pop culture references.

All the front-page promotion of this article about Roger Ailes finally got me to read it — mainly in search of the answer why the NYT thought it had such an important article.

At a time when the broadcast networks are struggling with diminishing audiences and profits in news, [Ailes] has built Fox News into the profit engine of the News Corporation. Fox News is believed to make more money than CNN, MSNBC and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS combined...

Yes, yes, how galling it must be, for liberal media to have a market share that corresponds to the actual proportion of liberals in the population. There is one news network that leans conservative, at it has an audience proportionate to the conservatives in the population. All you need is to observe that the presentation of news and opinion is going to have a slant, and it all makes sense. Presumably, the Times would like to rile its readers up about what a terrible, horrible man Roger Ailes is. They lob this quote from his Rupert Murdock's son-in-law Matthew Freud (who is the great grandson of Sigmund Freud):

"I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."

Aspires to, eh? But do they reach it? And if they don't, do they have self-awareness about their failure? I've got to think that this article itself is far from those aspirational standards.

Anyway, here's what caught my eye:

As powerful as he is within the News Corporation, Mr. Ailes remains a spectral presence outside the Fox News offices. National security had long been a preoccupation of Fox News, and it was clear in the interview that the 9/11 attacks had a profound effect on Mr. Ailes. They convinced him that he and his network could be terrorist targets.

On the day of the attacks, Mr. Ailes asked his chief engineer the minimum number of workers needed to keep the channel on the air. The answer: 42. “I am one of them,” he said. “I’ve got a bad leg, I’m a little overweight, so I can’t run fast, but I will fight.

“We had 3,000 dead people a couple miles from here. I knew that any communications company could be a target.”

The answer is 42?! What wag fed them that story? And who decided to pull the NYT's (bad) leg over the subject of 9/11? The NYT is still such a lamestain. It's a harsh realm indeed for the square old paper that wants so much to be hip.

Of course, the answer is 42! The answer to everything is 42. It's an old reference, a joke that is supposed to be so easily recognizable that you are really kind of a cob nobbler to resort to it these days. Ah, well. Rock on!