Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, on ‘Wet Noodle’ Patriarch Rupert Murdoch)

“He’s walking into walls. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s old man time. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a f-----g wet noodle — it's pathetic — around those kids. They're always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.”—The late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, on Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023)

As a youngster listening to the original “Eyewitness News” broadcast in the New York area, I would smile and lean forward whenever I heard short, dour reporter Milton Lewis tell the audience, “Now listen to this,” in a confiding, “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you” tone.

I experienced the same sensation when I read Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times report this week that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children have united against their father. They are arguing in court against him changing the family’s “irrevocable trust” to ensure that his anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, will stay in charge of the conservative multinational media empire.

Lewis’ “this” happens, in 1924, to be a plot twist right out Succession. There’s little that the creators much-honored comedy-drama did not imagine. Maybe they dismissed this idea in the belief that their audience would never accept this kind of switcheroo coming from a nonagenarian.

Murdoch is a nightmare spin on Dylan Thomas’ notion that old age should burn and rave at close of day. Having assisted at the birth of Trumpism, he finds himself unable either to embrace or evade his handiwork. 

However much he may carp about the former President, his attempts to promote an alternative GOP candidate have foundered. He’s even been dissed by Don Jr.: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

And now, this mess.

The discovery process in the litigation can only reveal more embarrassing secrets, the kind he sought to avoid after reaching a $787 million settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox.

Or maybe Murdoch is beyond mortification at this point in his life. After all, who else would marry for the fifth time at age 93 and dare to risk comparisons with billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who was a mere 89 when he wed Anna Nicole Smith?

Fox News and Murdoch’s New York print mainstays, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been making great sport of President Biden’s age-related difficulties. But Ailes came up with that “old man time” phrase about his former boss eight years ago. What could that line possibly entail now?

Quote of the Day (Eric Hoffer, on ‘The Gifted Propagandist’)

“The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients. The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers. he echoes their innermost feelings. Where opinion is not coerced, people can be made to believe only in what they already ‘know.’"—American social and political philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

Before many of us celebrate the Fox News firing of Tucker Carlson, we should recall that the audience that believed his propaganda—including those who even rained death threats on the objects of his rants—is still out there, unconverted and waiting for a suitable successor (much as Carlson himself filled the shoes of Bill O’Reilly after the latter was upended by sexual-harassment accusations).

It is possible that Carlson himself could come back on one of the Fox News competitors that the network feared, at the time of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, could be undercutting its “brand.”

Moreover, even after the disastrous U.K. phone hacking scandal of a decade ago, the Murdochs managed to bounce back to perpetrate more damage across their global empire.

But what the Dominion scandal—and the burgeoning lawsuits that Fox faces now—shows is that, though the network might be unchastened, it does not follow that it is completely unaccountable before the law. At least from now on, they will have to be less brazen if they don’t want their bottom line to suffer.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on a ‘Rotten Cabal’)

Roman Roy [played by Kieran Culkin]: “There's just something about betraying our father that just doesn't sit well with me.”

Kendall Roy [played by Jeremy Strong]: “He's a central player in a rotten cabal that has basically eaten the heart out of American democracy.”

Roman: “ ‘Rotten Cabal’ is a good name for a band.”— Succession, Season 3, Episode 2, "Mass In Time Of War," original air date Oct. 24, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Jamie Carragher, directed by Mark Mylod

So now the fourth and final season of Succession is at hand. Once the series ends, fans like me will not only miss its backstabbings and other assorted plot twists, but also wisecracks like the one above from Roman, as well as the unusual verb forms used by its characters and so many others in the business world (from this same episode, Kendall’s “You aren't Judasing, are you, Greg?”)

The media family that inspired this acclaimed satire, the Murdochs, are finding it harder these days to, as Kendall (again) put it, “clean-slate this.”

This week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis not only expressed doubt that powerful patriarch Rupert Murdoch would have trouble traveling to testify in the trial arising from Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, but also found that the evidence in the case “demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” and that Fox’s behavior constituted defamation per se.

The speed with which mendacity can ricochet around the world has grown exponentially, disrupting the media, politics, and even everyday life increasingly damaged by falsehoods about public health and climate change.

The law, despite its agonizingly slow pace and manifest shortcomings, may be the only institution in American life that can still hold accountable “the rotten cable” represented by the Murdochs’ News Corp. and the political grifters so long in league with it.

Will the Fox ‘Twin Galahads’ Lay Down Their Trump Lances?

“Mr. [Seamus] Colonnity’s valiant colleague, Mr. Corky Fartmartin, was joining in Fox's defense of the president. So we had on our hands twin Galahads tilting lances. But Mr. Fartmartin's efforts to link Hillary Clinton to all of Mr. Trump's calamities weren’t quite getting traction. Still, one had to applaud the passion with which these two ‘Lions of Fox’ defended their president. If only more members of the media were as patriotic. Mr. Trump returned the favor by inviting them frequently to golf with him, and told me to comp them whenever they stayed at Trump properties. Naturally, the media even managed to make these friendly gestures by Mr. Trump seem criminal.”— American author and political satirist Christopher Buckley, Make Russia Great Again: A Novel (2020)

Among the many joys of Christopher Buckley’s fake memoir by "Herb Nutterman"—President Trump’s seventh chief of staff—are the hilarious names created for their very thinly disguised, real-life counterparts. (Do I really need to tell you that Colonnity is Sean Hannity and Fartmartin is Tucker Carlson?)

The difficult aspect of writing this satire, though, lay in spinning out a plot more absurd than what has been happening in the Age of Trump—very much including at the media outlet that helped propel him to the White House.

The irony in Buckley’s passage above extends well beyond those names for the Fox prime-time stars. As any fan of Lerner and Loewe (or, for that matter, T.H. White and Sir Thomas Malory) would remember, pure-hearted Sir Galahad was loyal to King Arthur, a wise, judicious monarch who ruled Camelot with wisdom.

But “Colonnity” and “Fartmartin” follow—for reasons best known to themselves and their boss, Rupert Murdoch—a President governed not by reason but by rampaging resentment.

Like Facebook, Fox News has fashioned a monster out of Frankenstein: an audience that has turned angrily on its creator. A quarter century after Murdoch gave free rein to Roger Ailes to whip viewers into a lather of bitterness over the liberal elite, the network’s prime-time pundits have not seriously tried to convince them that Donald Trump lost the election fairly and that no amount of challenges based on nonexistent evidence can reverse that outcome--even as many of their colleagues have admitted the obvious.

How dismally they must have felt over a week ago to hear crowds in Washington chant, “Fox sucks!”—all because the network finally attempted to live up to its “Fair and Balanced” moniker by calling Arizona for Joe Biden.

As my friend Joe Ferullo noted in a recent piece for The Hill, Fox is hardly alone as a channel that traded objectivity for editorializing—it is part of a larger trend towards “the tribal journalism of cable news,” mirrored on the left by MSNBC and CNN.

But, in the current needlessly fevered transition, Fox bears unique responsibility for the belief of 70% of Republican voters polled by Politico/Morning Consult that Joe Biden's victory was not "free and fair." Their evening stars—Hannity, Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—have been particularly reckless in giving a forum for the Presidential voter fraud narrative.

All of this might be amusing, in its odd way, if Hannity and Carlson weren’t aware that Trump isn’t missing a few brain cells. But they are, and that knowledge opens them up to a charge of journalistic malpractice.

According to an article in Vanity Fair by CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter, Hannity has grown tired of the 24/7 burden of being on call as an off-camera sounding board and on-air booster of a President desperately needing attention. “Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates told Stelter.

But Hannity dares not say anything remotely like this publicly. Doing so would not merely end the friendship of the President with his “shadow chief of staff,” as Stelter suggests; it would also mean that progressives would remorselessly chide him for shameless cheerleading for the President, that the network would lose access to and patronage from a still-powerful figure in American politics, and that Hannity would open himself up to the same kind of retaliation experienced by two other media personalities formerly friendly with Trump, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

And so, Hannity tries to leave minimal daylight between himself and the President. "Americans will never be able to believe in the integrity and legitimacy of these [election] results," he told viewers as Joe Biden built an electoral and popular vote advantage that Trump did not enjoy in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. He has taken to retailing the President’s baseless charge that an electronic voting system used by election authorities across the United States has cost him millions of votes.

Carlson has had to perfect a similar balancing act of publicly embracing the President while privately stressing out over the President’s fecklessness. 

In early March, after backing Trump to the hilt during the impeachment fight, he felt compelled to fly down to the Trumps’ Mar-a-Lago resort to tell the President that COVID-19 really WAS a big deal. That warning, the commentator said, was based on a tip from a non-partisan figure in the U.S. government with access to intelligence, who claimed that the Chinese authorities were concealing the severity about the outbreak (advice, it should be noted, that the President could have availed himself of if he paid attention to his daily intelligence briefing).

The President’s shift in tone after their talk was short-lived, as Trump went back to downplaying the seriousness of a pandemic that, as of this writing, has claimed more than 250,000 American lives.

Nevertheless, Carlson feels obliged to give oxygen to the conspiracy theories of this lazy, lying excuse for a manager. The broadcaster has claimed that the "outcome of our presidential election was seized from the hands of voters" and put in the hands of "clearly corrupted city bureaucrats."

The problem is that Trump keeps devising wilder and wilder tests of the loyalty of his Galahads. One would have thought that Carlson, for instance, would have gotten a lifetime pass from the President by inappropriately comparing critics who think Trump contracted COVID-19 through his own reckless behavior with those who say women in provocative clothing ask to be raped.

(In a blog post right after that statement, Wonkette properly gave Carlson's insanely offensive analogy the back of her hand: “There is, in fact, no known outfit in the world that is scientifically proven to prevent sexual assault. Masks, on the other hand, are known to reduce the transmission of COVID-10. We all know this. It's been proven.”)

But Trump’s multi-state electoral challenges—knocked down, one by one, across the country—may be too much for even Carlson to stomach.

First, Carlson was embarrassed into offering an on-air apology about ballots illegally “cast” by dead people when one cited case, James Blalock of Georgia, turned out to be correctly—and legally—cast by his widow, Mrs. James Blalock.

Second, after offering Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as much time as she wanted to exhibit her “evidence” of voter fraud, she angrily declined, leading to Carlson’s on-air explanation of the brush-off.

It’s one thing when Fox personalities elsewhere on the schedule are finding it increasingly difficult to hide their impatience over the endless and pointless electoral lawsuits. It’s another entirely when even the “twin Galahads” are showing signs of cracking under the strain.

Yet Murdoch, Hannity and Carlson may have no choice but to follow through, as long as they can, with their daily nighttime charade, even as the most brazen challenge to Presidential election results in American history continues unabated.

Like any major company, Fox fears a competitor that can slice into its market share. Trump has already called on his supporters to watch Newsmax and One America News Network, two rivals that have been out-foxing Fox as purveyors of outlandish conspiracy theories.

The “twin Galahads,” then, may represent Murdoch’s best chance of warding off trouble from a President whose candidacy he endlessly promoted four years ago, despite privately dismissing him as an“[expletive] idiot,” according to an April 2019 article in the Daily Beast.

(The accompanying photo of Sean Hannity was taken May 29, 2014, by Michael Vadon; the photo of Tucker Carlson, speaking at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, FL, was taken Dec. 22, 2018, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

This Day in Media History (Beck, Palin Lead Pseudo-Event, ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally)

Aug. 28, 2010—In one of the more curious manifestations of the growing Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck (pictured) and Sarah Palin led a “Restoring Honor” rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.

The event, audaciously held on the 47^th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” had little discernible content but demonstrated plenty of discontent—principally, with an African-American President whose election two years previously would have been inconceivable without the civil-rights movement that had reached its rhetorical zenith on this spot.

At the time, "Restoring Honor" garnered quite a bit of attention, typified by the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, which devoted three articles in one issue to the rally: William Kristol’s lead editorial, along with features by Harvard government Professor Harvey Mansfield and Lee Harris, author of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

Searching the Internet for more recent retrospectives on the rally, though, I came up with nothing significant. You might wonder, then, why I am even writing about something that left so little discernible impact on the popular memory.

But I would argue that it is worth discussing—not only as a demonstration of the amorphous anger that coalesced into the Democratic Party’s midterm drubbing the following November, but also as an example of what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin had, in his 1961 book The Image, termed a “pseudo-event.”

That resentment and the movement’s penchant for such synthetic happenings were integral elements in both the Republican Party’s domination of Capitol Hill through much of this past decade as well as in the rise of Donald Trump and his continued popularity among Republicans.

But back to Beck.

Three years ago while on a tour bus in Savannah, I saw another passenger, a middle-aged man, blinking nonstop. I couldn’t think right away who he reminded me of. Then it hit me: this was a Glenn Beck look-alike. I groaned at even this low-grade, undoubtedly unconscious imitator.

Starting out as a radio personality, Beck made the leap to television at CNN’s Headline News. Eventually the libertarian commentator came to the attention of Roger Ailes, who was casting about for an additional ratings magnet besides Bill O’Reilly. After meeting with him, the Fox News head hired Beck.

Debuting the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, Beck was attracting more than 2 million viewers daily within a few weeks. Despite appearing in the 5 pm slot—not even the coveted prime time spot—Beck soon became the third highest-rated personality on the network.

 

He endeared himself to his audience with such pronouncements as that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and that Nazi tactics were progressive tactics.

Besides Beck, Fox had also had a hand in promoting Palin. From the moment of her selection as GOP Presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate, Ailes saw her as a natural for his medium with her biting criticism of both GOP regulars and liberal press outlets, or, in a term that has been endlessly and mindlessly retailed on social media ever since, “the lamestream media.”

With mounting legal bills from the election and her new-found celebrity status, Palin stepped down as governor in July 2009. Early the following year, she was on board as a Fox political commentator—as well as a star in the insurgent right wing whose endorsement could catalyze previously moribund candidates.

Although recognizing their ability to boost ratings, Ailes before long found Beck and Palin distinctly high maintenance. That feeling began to solidify with the “Restore Honor” rally, which—particularly in Beck’s case—the news head saw as an attempt at brand building outside the umbrella of the network, according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room.

In no small part, that explains why Fox made no special attempt to cover a happening by one of its own stars.

Ailes’ suspicions about Beck may have sprung from a conjunction of the rally itself, the anniversary of the civil-rights milestone, and his star’s own venture. Only a couple of days after “Restoring Honor” was held, Beck launched TheBlaze, a conservative cable media company. Indeed, it might be said that the venture arrived amid a “blaze” of publicity for its founder.

Whatever the rally’s shortcomings as actual news, it was certainly the kind of “pseudo-event” that Boorstin had in mind.  Using his criteria, it was planned rather than spontaneous; planned primarily to be reported or reproduced; ambiguous as it relates to the underlying situation; and intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even more obnoxiously, it sparked pseudo-events meant to counter it: on that very day by the Rev. Al Sharpton, and that fall in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”

But in another sense, "Restoring Honor" was not just a pseudo-event but also a daring act of political appropriation. More specifically, Beck and Palin capitalized on the inevitable association with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech without acknowledging the true nature of his challenge to the American political and social order of the time.

In a single sentence, Palin lumped King together with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as having “the same steel spine and moral courage” as the crowd.  Leave aside for a second the blatant flattery of those gathered together, not to mention the fatuity and fallaciousness of grouping them with a trio who risked death for establishing or extending freedom to Americans.

In essence, Palin was conveying that she knew that King was somehow important, but not why. The causes that drew her and Beck to the Tea Party—less government and lower taxes—were antithetical to the aims of Dr. King, who saw the federal government as the necessary guarantor of the rights of African-Americans and who in the weeks before his death was advocating for labor unions and the “Poor People’s Campaign” for jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children.

Does anyone really think that Beck and Palin would regard such measures collectively as anything other than socialism?

Certain aspects of the rally—all mentioned in the trio of Weekly Standard articles—gave it a veneer of non-partisanship: its stress on the non-objectionable “God and Country”; the ban on signs; the lack of specific references to political parties; even proceeds from the event to be designated for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

But all of this contrasts with the lack of progressive speakers who could have balanced the more conservative Beck and Palin, not to mention the use of the “Restoring Honor” label itself, which Professor Mansfield bluntly admitted was “a jab at President Obama.”

In retrospect, the irony of that “jab” is glaring. 

Whatever his real shortcomings as a leader, President Obama has conducted his private life without the sexual scandals that plagued a predecessor (Bill Clinton) and the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his administration was largely free of the ethics violations that characterized administrations of both parties going back nearly 40 years. Beck and Palin would have been better advised to employ that "Restoring Honor" tag now for the individual seeking reelection rather than a decade ago.

The best way to illustrate the fundamental shortcoming of Restoring Honor, though, is to contrast it with the March on Washington. 

Religious conviction animated most of those on the official program (King, John Lewis, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz) as surely as those at “Restoring Honor,” but they were there to promote concrete objectives—passage of civil-rights measures, ending school segregation, enforcing the 14^th Amendment, and minimum-wage and fair-labor legislation.

On the other hand, “Restoring Honor” was centered around themes—God and Country. They were not only unassailable (were liberals really against either?), but also, for that reason, unmeasurable.

Beck, for instance, had proclaimed, "Something beyond imagination is happening. America today begins to turn back to God." How to begin to assess the truth of that? What constitutes turning “back to God”? Who decides what that even is?

In producing a return to God, Beck and Palin might have done better to dispense with smarmy self-congratulation like this in favor of painful self-examination. 

They might have asked how many people might have been turned off by the religious right's near-incestuous embrace of political power, or how so many leaders of religious-affiliated institutions had alienated their faithful through their own financial and/or sexual corruption (seen most recently with Jerry Falwell Jr. and, in the past few decades, with the American hierarchy of my faith, the Roman Catholic Church).

Tweet of the Day (Jeff Greenfield, on the Tan Suit 'Scandal' of 5 Years Ago)

“Funny how journalists love to ridicule pols for obsessing over their dress—then go nuts when the President shows up in a tan suit.”—Political commentator Jeff Greenfield, Aug. 28, 2014 tweet

We’re now “celebrating”—if that’s the right verb—the fifth anniversary of the contrived uproar over Barack Obama’s late-summer tan suit.

I’m glad I had stopped paying attention to Fox News at that point, because they chose that point to have a major snit over this apparel, which to them signified not that it was late the dog days of summer but that it “confirms he’s a Marxist”—something having to do with a dark suit emphasizing he was serious about the office.

This, from the same cable channel that, in this past week, had on-air personality Katie Pavlich proclaim, without irony, that she was “still on Team Manifest Destiny Greenland”—confirming that there’s a clown car doing an express run from Mar a Lago to the Fox News studio in Rockefeller Center.

Quote of the Day (Frederick Douglass, on Offering ‘A Liberal and Brotherly Welcome to All’)

“I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth. If the white race may exclude all other races from this continent, it may rightfully do the same in respect to all other lands, islands, capes and continents, and thus have all the world to itself. Thus what would seem to belong to the whole, would become the property only of a part. So much for what is right, now let us see what is wise.

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt.”—African-American escaped slave, abolitionist, orator, and editor Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), “The Composite Nation,” delivered in Boston, Mass., December 7, 1869, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, Vol. 4, 1864-1880, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (1991)

In the last week or so, I’ve had a number of Facebook friends share on our newsfeed a Fox News link about how Sen. Ted Cruz had “schooled” Colin Kaepernick over the true meaning of a Frederick Douglass Fourth of July oration that the former NFL quarterback had quoted from. 

I suppose we should be grateful to Fox and Cruz for linking to that great speech and bringing it to more people’s attention.

I just wish the Trump Media Mouthpiece and the sniveling Senator from Texas, while they were at it, could have linked to another Douglass speech—the one that I have quoted from and linked to here in this post. It demonstrates a sense of history, a logic and a compassion that have gone sadly missing in the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,” on Fox News’ ‘Feel Facts’)

“Laura Ingraham” [played by Kate McKinnon]: “Some have claimed that suburban women revolted against the Republican Party. But doesn’t it feel more true that all Hispanics voted twice? You can’t dismiss that idea simply because it isn’t true and sounds insane. In fact, let’s add that to our list of ‘feel facts,’ which aren’t technically facts but they just feel true. Like:  ‘Latinos can have a baby every three months,’ ‘Santa is Jesus’ Dad,’ ‘If the earth is so warm, then why are my feet cold?’ ‘Blackface is a compliment,’ and ‘If you have less than five guns, you’re gay.’”—“Cold Open” segment, Saturday Night Live, Season 44, Episode 6, original air date Nov. 17, 2018

(Photo credit: NBC)