Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell made his love for Roger Ailes clear upon his death:
I knew Roger for over 30 years and from the start I was in awe of his talent. The Left would command a monopoly control of the so-called "news" media but for the Fox News Channel, and FNC would not exist but for him. The good Roger did for America is immeasurable. May he rest in peace.
That would be the tone sw=et by the MRC, which attacked anyone who inconveniently told the full truth about Ailes.
Kristine Marsh ranted that "Journalists from every major media outlet couldn’t contain their disgust for the man, Fox News, and the right" -- Gizmodo and the writer's room at the "Late Show With Stephen Colbert" are "major media outlets"? -- though in reality most were pointing out Ailes' less-than-savory attitude toward women and the sexual harassment allegations that forced him out at Fox News.
Kyle Drennen wrote that NBC "rightfully pointed out the controversy surrounding Ailes’ firing from Fox News over sexual harassment allegations" -- never mind that Drennen's co-workers don't believe it was rightful for anyone else to bring it up -- but then bashed "left-wing anti-Fox crusader" Gabriel Sherman for pointing out that Ailes "ruled Fox News with an iron fist" and that "he kind of died alone." Drennen doesn't dispute the accuracy of any of Sherman's remarks, only that he said them.
Scott Whitlock complained that a couple of people on MSNBC decided to "spike the ratings football" and "made sure to underline Fox’s struggling" following Ailes' departure and grumbled that Andrea Michell pointed out -- we again assume correctly, because Whitlock does not challege the accuracy of it -- that Ailes' "downfall was because of personal failures and the fact there was such a culture of illegality."
When NBC quoted "Ailes-hater" Sherman saying that Ailes' legacy is "transforming American politics into a contact sport where there’s no rules and anything goes, Nicholas Fondacaro huffed in response:
Sherman doesn’t seem to be a student of history because American politics has been a rough and tumble endeavor almost since its creation. There have instances of fistfights and canings in the U.S. Senate dating back to the 1800s. That’s not to mention the vile (for time period) things they would say about each other on the campaign trail and in political cartoons.
Of course, Foncacaro didn't mention that America had generally considered itself past such things. He's just making excuses for the unsavory side of Ailes.
Tim Graham went unhinged (to coin a phrase) on Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi's takedown of Ailes, managing to invoke "hippies" not once but twice:
One of the first delusional traits of leftists is to imagine there the media environment wasn’t “hyper-divisive” before Fox News began. They maintained the pretense that everyone loved a unanimously liberal news media, but that was obviously not the case. It would be smarted to say the “hyper-divisive media environment” started with the hippies in the Sixties, the ones who turned on their parents as atrocious war-mongering squares.
[...]
In this Taibbi fantasy, Rolling Stone was never a political fiefdom for hippie leftists and drug-crazed Hunter Thompson fanatics, which later aged into a sort of baby-boomer Tiger Beat for Clinton and Gore, Kerry and Obama (combined with Taibbi slashing the Republicans as monsters like Ailes). Instead, all political fear and loathing came from Fox[.]
Who goes on rants about "hippies" anymore? Most people got over that around, oh, the 1970s. Talk about out of touch.
Whitlock returned to complained that CBS invited on NPR media critic David Folkenflik (to whom Graham regularly loses Twitter fights) for pointing out that Ailes' Fox News encouraged an "emphasis on opinion rather than reporting," sneering, "As though liberal journalists on ABC, CBS and NBC haven’t been doing that for decades?"
Clay Waters howled that the New York Times was "graceless" and "classless" by accurately discussing Ailes' legacy. Perhaps Waters has forgotten the classless treatment of ABC's Peter Jennings, who used his death to tout how its archives were "packed with documentation of liberal bias" from him.
Waters also declared: "National Review<'s Jonah Goldberg offered a more (to use Ailes’ words) 'fair and balanced' accounting of Ailes' legacy." And by "fair and balanced" Waters apparently means that Goldberg devotes barely half a sentence to Ailes' sexual harassment scandal.
Also serving up the kind of "fair and balanced" Ailes obit is Trump sycophant Jeffrey Lord, whose May 20 MRC column handwaves Ailes' sexual harassment by playing dumb and also playing the Clinton Equivocation:
I have no idea what went on with the tales of Ailes and sexual harassment. I do know that when President Bill Clinton had women pouring out of the woodwork to accuse him of, among other things, dropping his pants to a state employee (Paula Jones) and telling her to “kiss it”, an allegation of rape (Juanita Broaddrick) and groping in the Oval Office (Kathleen Willey) liberals dismissed all of this as “only about sex” - instructing the rest of us to get a life and grow up. And for double-standards such as that Roger Ailes built Fox News.
Lord made no mention of the MRC's double standard on such matters, which insisted that it was "liberal bias" to even bring up the subject of Ailes' harassment and ludicrously pretended Ailes had nothing at all to do with Fox News' culture of sexual harassment.
