Whenever I hear a Fox News (or one of its northern version) defender rail on about how the network is ‘fair and balanced’ and in no way related to the Republican (or Conservative) party, I have to laugh. It’s so obviously not true that it has become the source of widespread mockery.
Now we have an historical document to back up our reservations. A Nixon-era document has surfaced most likely written by a young Roger Ailes entitled, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”. It’s all in the document, the blueprint for Fox News and the plan to tightly integrate Republican talking points and dirty tricks with network news.
The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about “indoctrination” when Obama did it more than 30 years later.
Read the whole thing. It’s the perfect anecdote to any claims made by Fox News (and in the north, by Kory Teneycke).
Here’s the beaut of them all from the memo:
“People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.”
If that doesn’t say “Fox News”, what does?
