Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax loves to tweak Fox News in portraying itself as the up-and-coming right-wing network amid turmoil at the bigger competition. One of the ways it's been doing that is by invoking Beth Ailes, widow of Fox News mastermind Roger Ailes, to regularly trash the channel. She's very much a loyalist to her late husband; a 2016 Newsmax article noted how she was in the "war room" he assembled to try and help him past numerous allegations of sexual harassment in his years at Fox News (it didn't work, and he lost his job).
We've noted how, in the wake of Fox News firing Tucker Carlson, Newsmax's Fox-bashing at the time included hyping Beth Ailes' attacks on post-Ailes Fox News:
Roger Ailes' widow took to social media to wish her late husband a "happy heavenly birthday" and at the same time bash Fox Corporation Chair Rupert Murdoch and Fox News for what the network has become.
Ailes, who as chairman and CEO built Fox News into a network empire, was forced out in July, 2016, amid sexual harassment allegations. He died May 18, 2017 at age 77 as a result of complications of a subdural hematoma.
"Happy Heavenly Birthday Roger Ailes. It took you 20 years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only 6 years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc. Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the checkbook but could never come close to your genius. RIP." Elizabeth Ailes tweeted Monday.
A few days later, Newsmax brought Beth Ailes on the air for more attacks:
Roger Ailes, who established Fox News Channel as a leader in conservative broadcasting, would never have fired host Tucker Carlson, Ailes' widow, Elizabeth Ailes, tells Newsmax.
Elizabeth Ailes tweeted earlier this week that it took her husband 20 years to build Fox into a powerhouse, while it took owner Rupert Murdoch and his sons only six years to cause havoc there.
"It did take Roger 20 years to build the channel, and he never once had his hand off the wheel," she said Thursday on "Eric Bolling The Balance""He had his 8 o'clock call, his 2:30 meeting, and he was always in touch even on a rare day that he might take a day off."
Roger Ailes, rather than firing Carlson, would have been involved in how Carlson "was positioning his shows," she said, "just as he was with Bill O'Reilly whenever there was something controversial or something big came up. He was always very much in touch with the talent, never telling them what to do or how to say something, but rather how to keep everybody in their lane, if you will."
Whwen it was revealed that Fox News generously matched employee donations to charitable causes no matter what they were, including the Satanic Temple and (even worse) Planned Parenthood, Ailes returned to Bolling's show on July 21 to complain:
Reacting to reports that Fox News is promoting far-left and even "satanic" charities through its employee donation portal, Beth Ailes, widow of Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, told Newsmax on Friday that what the country is seeing from the network is "industrialized devil worship."
On Friday, The Blaze reported that Fox News' company portal app, Fox Giving, matches employee donations of up to $1,000 to the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other liberal charities.
Beth Ailes, whose late husband established Fox News Channel as a conservative broadcasting pioneer, appeared on Eric Bolling The Balance" and said she couldn’t believe it when she first learned about what Fox News was doing.
[...]
Calling the network's actions "a betrayal of the Fox News core audience" that her husband "had sought to serve for so long," Ailes said it was also "an example of how the Murdochs have decided that they will give us all these reasons why this is OK. They will seek to have a triumph of reason over instinct.
"All of us know that devil worship, [gender-transition] care, you name it, some of the themes of these organizations that are available to match the donations ... they are evildoers," she continued. "As Christians, we have an obligation to call them out.
"Christianity is under attack. And what we're seeing from Fox is industrialized devil worship."
So birth control -- which is most of what Planned Parenthood does -- is "devil worship"? Weird.
As part of Newsmax's overall slagging of Fox News over its hosting of the first Republican presidential debate, Ailes appeared again on Newsmax on Aug. 29:
Fox News saw a ratings drop from previous Republican debates because of "four T's" – Tucker, trust, talent, and Trump – Elizabeth "Beth" Ailes told Newsmax on Tuesday night.
Ailes, the wife of the late Roger Ailes, the founding chair of Fox News, appeared on "Eric Bolling The Balance" to discuss Fox's catastrophic drop in ratings for its recent Republican debate, which former President Donald Trump skipped due to a "hostile" network.
[...]
"The decline of Fox can be told as a story of three or perhaps four T's: That would be Tucker, trust, talent and, of course, President Trump," Ailes told Bolling. "Imagine if the network had not fired Tucker, we could imagine that Tucker got the president to participate in a debate or perhaps give an interview, maybe not at the same time.
"But imagine how many people would have watched that."
Ailes also took a xenophobic shot at Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch for purportedly not being American enough to understand right-wingers:
Ailes suggested the Murdoch family, controlling shareholders of Fox's parent company, are out of touch with Fox's audience.
"Trust is something that takes a lot of hard work," she said.
"I believe Rupert, the major Murdoch, and Lachlan, the minor Murdoch, do not understand America the way Roger did because they weren't born here," she added of the Australian billionaire and his family.
"They don't have the love of country, in my opinion, that only comes from being born here," she said.
Ailes even put in a plug for her new apparent right-wing TV home:
"It is not the brand it once was," she said.
And that fact has opened up competition from networks like Newsmax.
"I think that a lot of the audience has left," Ailes told Bolling.
"And that's because there's no more Eric Bolling. There's no more Bill O'Reilly. There's no Greta [Van Susteren]. Where is everybody? They're on Newsmax."
It was not mentioned that the reason Bolling and O'Reilly are no longer at Fox News is that they both left under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations -- just like Roger Ailes did. It was also not mentioned that Fox News is continuing to face litigation in connnection with Roger Ailes' alleged boorish behavior. Beth Ailes will never be asked by Bolling why she chose to stand by and defend such a sleazy womanizer and why she continues to do so.
