If this mass-assembled outrage sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very old. As former Gawker editor John Cook points out, Fox News president and former Nixon aide Roger Ailes was among the first political strategists to recognize how images of a President playing golf—when broadcast widely on television—can magically become their own meta-story about presidential optics, supplying cost-free political capital to the opposing party. … Cook, now the editor-in-chief of The Intercept, was the first reporter to publish Ailes’s memos about presidential optics—which ultimately laid the groundwork for the rise of Fox News—after obtaining them through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. You can read his dissection of those memos, and much more, below. … Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a fair and balanced counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the prejudices of network news and deliver pro-administration stories to heartland television viewers. The memo—called, simply enough, A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War. edge-cache.gawker/gawker/ailesfiles/ailesfiles.html #Propaganda
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 10:23:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015