Murdoch No Longer "In Love" With FOX News Chief Roger Ailes
Reported by Ellen - September 2, 2008 -
From a profile of Rupert Murdoch in Vanity Fair:
Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed—he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.
The article also discusses a meeting between Barack Obama and Ailes:
Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist. Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand. A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.
It's too bad Obama fell for this tripe, assuming he did. Though I'm an adamant believer that Democrats should appear on FOX News, nobody should believe that they will be treated with anything but the same contempt they get when they don't appear. In my opinion, Obama should have laughed in Ailes' face and then gone on offense against him and his propaganda-spewing hatemongers.
But in case you think a new Murdoch is in the offing, the article puts forth a scenario even more frightening than his helmsmanship at the Wall Street Journal: a takeover of The New York Times, too:
(Murdoch) is spending time now in consideration of an even more far-fetched fantasy, The New York Times: he’d really like to own it too. Now, everybody around him continues to tell him that buying the Times is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never … And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion. But it’s obviously irresistible to him.
