In a nutshell

There must be a train load of Congressional and powerful men out there sweating it out right now.

Trump & Ailes

July 21, 2016:

Over the weekend, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump defended Roger Ailes, the former chairman and CEO of Fox News who resigned from his position Thursday amid allegations of sexual harassment.

On Showtime’s The Circus, Trump called Ailes a “great guy” and lauded him for his achievements in media. “Roger is – I mean, what he’s done on television, in the history of television, he’s gotta be placed in the top three or four or five," Trump said, adding that his resignation is “too bad.”

  USA Today

September 10, 2016:

Mr. Ailes made his name in political television when Richard Nixon hired him to help fan white anger over the civil rights movement. While in the Nixon White House, Mr. Ailes worked on a plan to create a pro-G.O.P. TV operation.

[...]

Mr. Trump, who once told a female contestant on his TV show, “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” stood by his pal, bringing Mr. Ailes on board to help him prepare for the presidential debates.

  NYT

Which comes first: Trump tweeting that Roger Ailes was a good friend and a great man or his insistence on leaving his foreign trip to go to Ailes' funeral?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Faux News Flashback

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A Legend Scumbag Dies

Roger Ailes, who shaped the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and then became a dominant, often-intimidating force in American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News, which he created with Rupert Murdoch’s money and guided for two decades until he was forced out in a sexual predation scandal, died on Thursday. He was 77.

No cause of death was given in an announcement by Mr. Ailes’s wife, Elizabeth, but he was a hemophiliac long plagued by obesity and arthritis.

  NYT

And lack of decency.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Just Another Misogynist Fox Personality

Bill O’Reilly’s top-rated Fox News show may be starting to feel a financial sting, with 12 firms taking action after allegations that he sexually harassed several women.

The automakers Hyundai, BMW and Mitsubishi, the financial firm T Rowe Price, the personal finance site Credit Karma, the insurer Allstate, the drugmakers Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, the pet food company Ainsworth, the men’s shirt seller Untuckit, and the online marketing firm Constant Contact said Tuesday that they had joined Mercedes-Benz in pulling their ads from the show.

The moves come after a weekend report in the New York Times that O’Reilly and his employer paid five women $13m to settle harassment or other allegations of inappropriate conduct by Fox’s star.

  Guardian

The sexual harassment scandal that engulfed Fox News last year and led to the ouster of its chairman, Roger Ailes, continued to batter the network on Monday, as a new lawsuit described unwanted sexual advances by Mr. Ailes.

[...]

Earlier on Monday, Julie Roginsky, a current Fox News contributor, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Ailes, Fox News and Bill Shine, the network’s co-president, asserting that she faced retaliation for rebuffing Mr. Ailes’s sexual advances and for refusing to disparage Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued Mr. Ailes last summer.

  NYT

Seems like it might be a systemic corporate problem. It's obviously an American one.

When will the accuseds' attorneys start using the defense that if it's okay for the president of the United States to do it, it's not illegal?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Taking Down Independent Press

Since major corporate press has become little more than a government megaphone, this new development of  billionaires suing independent online journalists/news sources to the point of destroying them is more than a little concerning.

If you thought the bankruptcy of Gawker by billionaire Peter Thiel was a fluke, or that Gawker just got what it deserved, maybe you should think again. Other rich and powerful public figures already seem to be taking their cues from Thiel’s blueprint for destroying a news organization, and the entire media world could wind up paying the price.

[...]

The Financial Times reported that Ailes is looking into a possible lawsuit against New York magazine and its investigative reporter Gabriel Sherman, who has received widespread acclaim for his thorough reporting on the myriad sexual harassment allegations against Ailes and Fox News. Melania Trump, meanwhile, has already sued the Daily Mail and an obscure blogger for $150 million over stories suggesting she once worked as a call girl.

[...]

While it’s certainly too early to tell if there will be a dramatic rise in lawsuits—especially by extremely wealthy plaintiffs—that prospect has the potential to significantly raise the cost of insurance in the future. And if things get too ugly, there’s no requirement for insurance companies to offer policies to media organizations.

[...]

Yes, news organizations have faced libel suits for decades (and luckily, our country has the world’s most robust protections against them). But past libel plaintiffs have traditionally been looking for a settlement and/or a retraction.

[...]

Hogan structured his lawsuit to do maximum damage to Gawker, rejecting settlement offers with the sole purpose of forcing the company to spend as much money as possible.

[...]

Less wealthy news organizations may be forced into the same corner Gawker was without ever losing, and that’s not to speak of the damage such cases could do to nonprofit news organizations or independent freelance journalists.

[...]

How many media organizations will spike stories involving controversial figures just to avoid years of legal hassle and skyrocketing legal bills? How many journalists will just not pursue those stories in the first place, knowing the extra layers of bureaucracy they’ll have to fight through to get their stories published. And if there is a chance individual reporters are also on the hook, why would they risk their livelihood for a story to begin with?

  Columbia Journalism Review

Their livelihood?  How about their life?  Gary Webb.

Welcome to life under oligarchy and the CIA.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Again?

Donald J. Trump has shaken up his presidential campaign for the second time in two months, hiring a top executive from the conservative website Breitbart News and promoting a senior adviser in an effort to right his faltering campaign.

Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, will become the Republican campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for Mr. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, will become the campaign manager.

[...]

“It’s an expansion at a busy time in the final

“We met as the ‘core four’ today,” Ms. Conway added, referring to herself, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates.
  NYT

New campaign VIPs aren't going to help. He's already off the tracks. He needs a clean-up crew.

Both Ms. Conway and Mr. Bannon, whose news organization has been very favorable to Mr. Trump since he entered the primaries, are close with Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the father-and-daughter conservative donors who have become allies of the candidate and are funding a “super PAC” that is working against Hillary Clinton.

[...]

Mr. Bannon has no experience with political campaigns, but he represents the type of bare-knuckled fighter that the candidate had in Corey Lewandowski, his combative former campaign manager, who was fired on June 20.

[...]

Mr. Bannon has been a supporter of Mr. Trump’s pugilistic instincts, which the candidate has made clear in interviews he is uncertain about suppressing.

[...]

[Ms. Conway] is well liked by Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who had been serving as the de facto campaign manager.

Ah, yes. How silly of me. He's not looking for strategists, he's doling out favors. Imagine what his presidential cabinet might look like. All his family members and the remaining ass-kissers in January.

Uncertain about suppressing? Seems pretty certain to me that he has no intention of suppressing it.

The moves were hammered out beginning on Sunday in meetings at Mr. Trump’s golf club at Bedminster, N.J. Roger Ailes, the former chairman of Fox News, also met with Mr. Trump that day, as The New York Times reported on Tuesday, and he will be part of efforts to prepare Mr. Trump in his debate against Mrs. Clinton and other tasks, according to three people briefed on the discussions.

Fired from Fox for sexual harassment, Ailes is now working for Trump. Well, he probably was even before he got fired from Fox.

On Monday, he delivered a speech on terrorism using a teleprompter rather than the off-the-cuff style he prefers. And on Tuesday, he offered yet another scripted address, this time on law and order.

He'll have to break out soon or explode. Start the countdown.

“We’re still winning hearts and minds every day despite an avalanche of negative media coverage,” Mr. Pence said during the closed-door session, according to audio provided to The Times.

Time, Mr. Pence added, was on their side. “It’s preseason, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “The gun starts on Labor Day.”

Oh, Holy Hell. Was that simply a poor choice of words, or was that a dog whistle?

I bet you're wondering what Kellyanne Conway looks like, aren't you?

That what you had in mind?

Oh, and Bannon?

Now, THAT was actually a surprise, wasn't it?

Oh My

Roger Ailes will be dismissed from Fox News, the network he built almost singlehandedly, in the wake of multiple reports that he sexually harassed his female subordinates over a period of decades and a high-profile lawsuit from former top anchor Gretchen Carlson, according to a new report.

[...]

Ailes is currently the chairman and CEO of Fox News and Fox Television Stations..

[...]

Ailes is currently the chairman and CEO of Fox News and Fox Television Stations.

[...]

Ailes will be asked this week by James Murdoch to resign or face dismissal if Murdoch has his way; his father Rupert Murdoch and brother Lachlan are advocating to hold off until the end of the Republican national convention, an event Fox News covers zealously. The three agree that Ailes’s time at the network is over, according to Sherman.

  The Guardian

If high profile Gretchen Carlson hadn't come forward, the others would have never been heard.

I would say this is good for everyone, and particularly news seekers, but I'll need to wait to see who replaces him.

..but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

But Do Fox Viewers Think That's Bad?

Or do they see him as just being a "real man"?

NYPD - to Protect and Serve the (Murdoch Empire)

When Occupy Wall Street protesters marched past media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s posh 5th Avenue penthouse during the “Millionaires March” on October 11, they were accompanied by a “very light police presence” according to a reporter at the scene. But down at Rupert’s News Corp. headquarters on Sixth Ave.–which has never been a terrorist or protest target of any significance–the media empire is guarded by a 24-hour-a-day New York Police Department security detail seven days a week, a patrol that one security expert estimated costs the city at least half a million dollars a year.

[...]

CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC [...] contract security guards from private vendors, employ their own security staff and, in some cases, hire a paid detail of off-duty or retired police officers, whose cost is incurred at the network’s expense.

[...]

A security guard inside the lobby of the News Corp. building said that the police presence out front “has nothing to do with Fox News,” and is there simply because it’s a “high-profile” area. Yet cops who spoke with The Daily Beast said that they are posted at the site to protect Fox News as part of a counterterrorism initiative.

[...]

No other news network gets comparable NYPD protection. [...] As best we could decipher a rationale for this extraordinary sentry at the gates of the Fox empire, it appears to be fueled by the security obsession of Fox News chief Roger Ailes.

[...]

Accounts vary as to how long the NYPD security detail has been stationed in front of the two-million-square-foot tower. One police officer said it’s definitely been more than a year. An ex-Fox News employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the NYPD presence has been there since the network got underway in the mid 1990s.

  Daily Beast

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.