Roger Ailes

Six weeks into his new job as an MSNBC host, Al Sharpton has made it crystal clear he despises members of the GOP.

So far he has begun one third of his shows hatefully saying, "Hey, Republicans" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"Every other network has given all their shows to liberals. We are the balance."

So said Roger Ailes in a profile written by the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz Sunday which also included the Fox News chairman taking a shot at MSNBC's Joe Scarborough:

It seems no matter what Sarah Palin does or doesn't do, she's going to be lambasted by America's press - even the supposedly "conservative" ones.

On Tuesday's "Morning Joe," co-host Joe Scarborough used Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's successful campaign launch as a means of bashing the former Alaska governor (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Chris Matthews on Thursday said Fox News ought to hire disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to play the "typical liberal with all the lifestyle qualities of a typical liberal" to talk about "the latest scandal every night."

Politico's Ben Smith responded to the "Hardball" host, "I asked them about it today. They didn’t buy it. They referred me to CNN" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Liberals have had a thrill up their leg over the Rolling Stone report that Fox News boss Roger Ailes is paranoid about Muslim and gay enemies and insisted on bomb-proof glass in his office. Ailes responded to Howard Kurtz of Newsweek: “Ailes can still get riled by personal criticism, dismissing as ‘fantasy’ and ‘fiction’ a Rolling Stone report that he travels with a large security detail and has blast-resistant office windows. He invited me to throw a rock at the glass—and promised security would arrest me.”

In AdWeek, liberal author Michael Wolff asserts both Rolling Stone and New York magazine profiles of Ailes failed to nick their target. Wolff said Ailes is an "epochal figure" in TV, a network news legend:

For approaching three years, so-called journalists have been calling former Alaska governor Sarah Palin an idiot.

In an interview with the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz, Palin's employer at Fox News, Roger Ailes, marvelously said, "She's so smart she’s got the press corps running up the whole East Coast behind her bus”:

On Tuesday night’s edition of The Ed Show on MSNBC, substitute host Thomas Roberts promoted an upcoming segment: “He is convinced that al-Qaeda is out to get him. And he believes gay activists want to fire bomb his office. Who are we talking about? The delusional world of Roger Ailes, coming up.”

Roberts is shameless. He’s sitting on the same show where Ed Schultz spun delusions like “The Republicans... want to see you dead,” and they like it when women get incurable cancer. But Roberts was spreading stories from Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson, and interviewed him at the end of the Tuesday show.

In a 10,000 word poison-pen biography on Fox News Channel president Roger Ailes, containing all expected anti-FNC paranoia, Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson engages in what has sadly become standard practice for the left's Fox haters: he slimes the channel, then fails to produce a single quote from a supporter of the network. And for all of Dickinson's concern over Fox's supposed influence on conservative politics (Ailes's main offense, by Dickinson's telling), the piece of course pays no heed to the dominance of liberalism in American newsrooms. In short, as Mark Judge noted at the Daily Caller, Ailes's offense is one against liberalism, not against journalism.

As NewsBusters previously reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews said Thursday, "It’s so pathetic that Roger Ailes has put Sarah Palin on television."

According to TVNewser, Ailes struck back Friday:

The President’s secret meetings with Fareed Zakaria – the same reporter who openly used a CNN network broadcast to promote Obama in 2008 – show a clear and disturbing double standard at CNN.

For decades, the liberal media have repeatedly condemned conservatives in the media who communicated privately with Republican presidents. They furiously attacked George Will in 1980 when he advised candidate Ronald Reagan, and trounced on Roger Ailes when he sent President Bush a note about the new war on terror in the wake of September 11th.  Neither of them was a reporter.

For anyone who thinks liberals are calm and rational beings, free of bitterness and rage, we can always disprove that with the radio show of Mike Malloy. On Thursday, Malloy ranted and raved about the story that Fox News boss Roger Ailes is said to have told publisher Judith Regan to lie and conceal her affair with Bernard Kerik before federal investigators as Kerik was considered for the Cabinet. This was enough to send Malloy off the deep end:

Well, I would think it also would be that it would also be the basis of a criminal investigation against this lard-ass bastard -- Rupert Murdoch's anti -American terrorist broadcast organization!

From there, Malloy ranted not only against Ailes, but against Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, who apparently are all anti-American terrorists:

It's been less than 24 hours since Keith Olbermann's abrupt departure from MSNBC, and folks are all atwitter with predictions about where he'll end up.

TV critic Tim Goodman's suggestion that the former "Countdown" host should go to Fox News is destined to anger people on both sides of the aisle:

Esquire Magazine wants to know: Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America? Unfortunately for them, what readers glean from the piece tells them much more about the inner workings of the liberal mind than Roger Ailes. A man with a knack for finding talent and cultivating its creative impulses is scorned instead of celebrated. A man who can accurately identify glaring voids in the marketplace and fill them with quality products is ridiculed.

National Public Radio is right to defend itself against charges of Nazism leveled at the radio station by Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who has since apologized for the remark. But NPR decided to make the leap from defending the station to attacking Fox News as uniquely disposed to Nazi comparisons, an absurd claim on its face.

There are commentators on both sides of the political spectrum who routinely prove Godwin right. But being the predictably-liberal news outlet that it is, NPR invoked vague claims by far-left Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (neither his ideological leanings nor the multitude of his most recent baseless Fox accusations are mentioned) to paint FNC as unique in its invocation of Nazism.

  On Thursday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, after guest Howard Fineman of the Huffington Post predicted that Republican Congressmen would be reluctant to extend unemployment benefits, host Keith Olbermann asserted that, referring to congressional Republicans, "They don't live in this world. They don't live in this country. And I think we'd be better off if they didn't live in this country."

Later, during the show’s "Worst Person" segment, Olbermann attacked FNC’s Roger Ailes for the second consecutive night - this time for his recent attack on NPR and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. Olbermann addressed Stewart directly, suggesting that the Daily Show host was wrong to lump MSNBC in with his criticism of FNC, and also suggesting that the side representing FNC and conservatives is "close to playing with its poop." Olbermann: "Thanks to Mr. Ailes for proving my point about false equivalence. And an aside to Mr. Stewart: Jon, I told you so. I mean, I might disagree with you, but I'd never think you were crazy or hateful. But Maher is right. One side sticks to the facts, and the other side is close to playing with its own poop."

Fox News boss Roger Ailes offered his (negative) opinion of liberal comedian-slash-"fake news" personality Jon Stewart in the overlooked opening of his interview with Howard Kurtz:

When Jon Stewart was appearing on The O’Reilly Factor a few weeks back, he stopped by Roger Ailes’ office for an hour-long chat about politics.   “He’s obviously really, really smart,” the Fox News chairman says. “He openly admits he’s sort of an atheist and a socialist. He once told me he would’ve voted for Norman Thomas.” 

Ailes was appraising the Daily Show star in a friendly, good-natured tone. But that tone changed when the conversation turned to Stewart’s continuous carping about the excesses of cable news:  “He hates conservative views. He hates conservative thoughts. He hates conservative verbiage. He hates conservatives.”   

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes drew a whirlwind of attention for using the German N-word in describing NPR's purge of Juan Williams in an interview with Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast: “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.” Ailes quickly apologized to the Anti-Defamation League for the Nazi comment. But Brian Montopoli at CBS's Political Hotsheet blog took that story and dropped a real un-factual whopper about NPR's taxpayer subsidies:

Putting aside the Nazis comment, the claim that NPR (previously known as National Public Radio) uses government funding to "keep them alive" is questionable at best: Even when indirect funding is included, less than one tenth of NPR's budget comes from taxpayer dollars. It receives no direct federal funding for operations.

 On Wednesday’s Countdown show, Keith Olbermann featured a "Worst Person" segment for the first time since indefinitely suspending it over two weeks ago as the MSNBC host decided to go after Pamela Geller, whom he called a "buffoon"; Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, who committed the sin of lumping MSNBC in with FNC while criticizing cable news; and frequent target FNC’s Roger Ailes.

In awarding the first place dishonor to Geller, he linked her opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque the bombing of a mosque in Jacksonville, Florida. Olbermann: "But our winner, Pam Geller. If anybody committed the original sin of stirring up the blind, stupid anger that is religious hatred in this country, it’s this buffoon."

He soon added: "Well, there is a problem with the two minutes hate:You may lose control of it, and it may come back to attack you. It spread from a proposed Islamic center in New York to an actual mosque bombing in Jacksonville to protests in Tennessee to this moronic anti-Sharia law law in Oklahoma and now Phoenix."

Jonathan Strong of the Daily Caller has more shocking e-mails from liberal journalists today. He starts with an NPR producer who admits flaming hatred for Rush Limbaugh:

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.

But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

So much for the idea that NPR is an oasis of civil discourse in a desert of vituperation. Spitz is a producer for trendy-hot NPR station KCRW and its nationally distributed talk show Left Right & Center (which could be called Three Leftists and Tony Blankley). But Spitz has also done stories for NPR's evening newscast All Things Considered.

It took a while, but MSNBC President Phil Griffin has finally admitted and embraced his cable network's hard-left slant. He told the Chicago Tribune that he will try to carve out a niche on the left, hoping some day to rival the Fox News Channel's record-setting ratings.

Not so long ago, Griffin insisted that MSNBC was not "tied to ideology" -- unlike Fox, which simply could not be trusted, he claimed. Griffin even knocked FNC President Roger Ailes's business model, criticizing him for "creat[ing] an ideological channel… I give them total credit. I tip my hat to them. They scored. But it was ideological and opportunistic. It was a business plan."

Griffin has apparently abandoned his disdain for that business plan. He spoke glowingly of Ailes in an interview with the Tribune, saying the FNC president "changed the world" with his wildly successful business model, which went beyond just reporting to create brand loyalty and provide viewers with commentary that speaks to their views and preferences. MSNBC will now be (openly) emulating that model.

One of my favorite scenes from the eponymous Mary Tyler Moore sitcom of the '70s -- doofus anchorman Ted Baxter is on the air when producer Mary Richards rushs into the studio with breaking news.

Baxter sees Richards from the corner of his eye as she waves the bulletin to get his attention. Laughing nervously, Baxter says, Can't you see I'm on the air, Mary?

Richards hands the bulletin to Baxter and whispers, Read it. Whereupon Baxter does just that -- silently. Out loud!, Richards implores. Followed by Baxter reading the bulletin, skeptically, then crumbling it in a ball and saying, Now back to the real news.

Howell Raines lost his executive editor’s job at The New York Times for promoting the career of Jayson Blair, a black drug addict and fantasist who invented entire stories describing the hills of West Virginia from a saloon down the street in New York. But somehow Raines still imagines himself a media bigfoot who can pronounce on the State of Journalism, a one-man Pulitzer Prize panel. This is a little like a White House chef who poisoned an entire state-dinner crowd mounting a soapbox to lecture that the new chefs can’t be trusted.

Of course, that soapbox must be provided first. So who would give this naked man a fig leaf of respectability? The Washington Post would.

The Posties awarded Raines their marquee venue – the Sunday Outlook section -- to denounce Fox News Channel and its owner Rupert Murdoch. Announcing this was tugging at his "professional conscience" (thus suggesting he has one), Raines demanded to know "Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team?"

Howell Raines was executive editor of the New York Times for 21 turbulent months before being forced out in June 2003, felled by the journalistic malpractice committed by a young reporter he supported, Jayson Blair, and his personal callousness and autocratic management style, as well as launching a feminist crusade against the Augusta National Golf Club (home of the Masters golf tournament) that embarrassed even fellow liberal journalists.

In retirement, the admitted "liberal to radical" Raines has settled into a Captain Ahab role against his sworn enemy, that two-headed white whale in charge of Fox News: news chief Roger Ailes and the network's owner, News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch.

Back on February 1, Raines made his first appearance in the Times since leaving with a column ostensibly about the Greensboro, NC civil rights sit-in, but also about the deviltry that is Fox News.

Today, however, there's no denying that traditional reportage of political and social trends seems almost as out of date as segregation. Surely the civil rights movement would have been hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from Fox News and the cable talk shows. Luckily for the South, that kind of butchered news was left mostly to a few extremist newspapers in Virginia and Mississippi and to local AM radio talk shows that specialized in segregationist rants.

Define hypocrisy: Arianna Huffington claiming that Fox News President Roger Ailes plays off of Americans' fear and paranoia.

Indeed, while Huffington Post columnists call American political leaders criminals, terrorists, and Nazis and occasionally fantasize about their deaths, Huffington has the gall to claim, "If you’re looking for the usual flame-throwing, name-calling, and simplistic attack dog rhetoric....don’t bother coming to The Huffington Post." She then turns around and criticizes Ailes for appealing to paranoia. Unbelievable.

But Ailes has never been one to shrink from a fight. He noted Huffington's arrant hypocrisy on Monday's segment of "Uncommon Knowledge", a webshow produced by National Review Online (video and transript below the fold - relevant portion begins at 0:52):

Does Arianna Huffington consider Glenn Beck more radical and dangerous than an advocate of Islamic Sharia law? She's let off a lot of hot air lately criticizing Fox News president Roger Ailes for employing Beck, but it turns out that on the Huffington Post's payroll is an envoy to the United States from the Somali Unity government, led by the Islamic Courts Union.

The ICU is a strong proponent of Sharia law, and an organization dubbed by some the Taliban of Africa for its radical interpretation of Islam and its support for some violent elements of the Islamic community (like Osama Bin Laden).

Abukar Arman, the Somali Unity government's envoy to the United States, is open about his advocacy of Sharia as long as it is "adapted to address contemporary political, social, economic, and spiritual challenges in a just way." He lays out a number conditions that would have to be satisfied for sharia to be effectively implemented in Somalia. These include respect for life, assembly, conscience, thought, rule of law, political freedom, and international peace. Considering the violent history of the Somali Unity government and he ICU, that is not likely.

If someone's going to play speech police, one might think it would be wise to make sure her own house was in order prior to hurling charges. But, for Arianna Huffington, editor of The Huffington Post, there are two sets of rules.

Huffington, in an appearance on HLN's Feb. 2 "The Joy Behar Show," defended a Jan. 12 post by the Huffington Post's TV-Radio critic Bill Mann, which he called the network "a malignant tumor on the body politic."

"Yes, well, first of all, there's a big distinction between who your anchors are, who are your employees and what they are saying and what your bloggers are saying," Huffington said. "And in our case, of course, what he said, what our blogger he was quoting said, was started by Roger, because he never called him a tumor. He said Fox was a tumor, on American society, which is a legitimate view that many people hold."

Fox News's Glenn Beck claimed Monday that liberal publisher Arianna Huffington asked him to write for her when they met at last year's Time 100 Most Influential People in the World dinner.

This revelation should come as quite a shock to readers of the Huffington Post who are regularly treated to the most vile depictions of Beck by Huffington and her contributors.

Potentially more shocking is this news surfacing roughly 24 hours after Huffington went on ABC's "This Week" to confront Fox News chairman Roger Ailes about why he allows Beck on his cable news channel.

Beck addressed the matter on his radio program Monday (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t The Right Scoop):

It was a metaphysical certitude the classic battle between Fox News's Roger Ailes and liberal publisher Arianna Huffington on Sunday's "This Week" would send many in the mainstream media over the top, and comedian Joy Behar didn't disappoint.

As "View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg gave the audience the background of the matter Monday -- "Fox News president Roger Ailes pointed out that on the Huffington Post he's been called quote a malignant tumor with a face like a fist" -- Behar interrupted, "It's not true."

Moments later, the opinionated comedian demonstrated her astounding lack of knowledge saying, "According to what I've read, first of all, the guy who wrote this tumor thing was not talking about him. He was talking about Fox."

She erroneously continued (video embedded below the fold, h/t NB reader Carla Brehm):

There was a marvelous fireworks display on Sunday's "This Week" when Fox News chairman Roger Ailes squared off against liberal media powerhouses Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, and substitute host Barbara Walters.

The one standing at the end likely didn't vote for Barack Obama.

In the second half of the Roundtable segment, Walters began by asking her conservative guest about the White House's much-publicized battle with his network.

Almost as if scripted, this teed up Huffington and Krugman to voice their displeasure with Fox.

Fortunately, Ailes was up to the challenge making for a very entertaining segment (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript and commentary):