Monday, 30 May 2011

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.
“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”
The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”
Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits...”

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Tim Dickinson @'Rolling Stone'

A MUST READ!

Beyond Afghanistan
A Regional Security Strategy for South and Central Asia
By Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.), Andrew Exum and Matthew Irvine
(PDF)

Moroccan Activists Slam Music Festival as Corrupt

Bradley Manning's Father Says His Greatest Fear Is Son Is Guilty

"Syrians have suffered under a regime for long enough. This video is dedicated to those in Syria who have lost their lives in the name of freedom."

Thanks to @emilybarkerhalo for the link.

Babies can perform sophisticated analyses of how the physical world should behave: study

Ad (nauseum) break # 21

(Thanx to 'The Fix')

The Trouble With E-Mail

Anything But Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v. 2.0

WSB with Husker Du

HERE

(PDF)

Download

Faust - Interview with Jean-Hervé Peron

(Excerpt)

Why the name Faust?

'It is German for "fist" which is a symbol for revolution which is what we thought we were part of ... and maybe we were too :) Also it is the name of a work by Goethe where a man sells his soul to obtain what he longs for...and this what we were doing : selling our souls to the music industry in order to do the music we wanted to.'

I will be catching both the Faust gig as part of the International Jazz Fest here in Melbourne and also the talk with J-HP the following day where I hope to at least present J-HP with an 'Exile On Moan Street' badge as I know he is reader of this blog.
The talk is free but bookings are essential.

TOTAL sleeve by Peter Saville and ParrisWakefield

Peter Saville and and Howard Wakefield of design studio ParrisWakefield have collaborated on the artwork of a new compilation of music by Joy Division and New Order called TOTAL, due for release on June 6 from Rhino...
Endeavouring to capture the essence of both Joy Division and New Order, Saville and Wakefield agreed that the Helvetica Heavy Italic used on the cover of New Order's Technique album, perfectly conveyed the band's graphic look, and also that, typographically speaking, Joy Division was predominantly uppercase. So for the cover of this new compilation, the pair decided to merge the two and set the word TOTAL in italicised upper case Helvetica Heavy.
Originally the word TOTAL, as below, was set to appear as large as possible so it fitted on the front cover. However the band decided there was too much white space.
"The 'O' was the sexiest letter," says Wakefield, "with the overlapping letter-forms alluding to the sleeve of New Order's Technique album and also to the band's 1989 single, Run 2. Funnily enough 'O' is also the only letter to appear in New Order, Joy Division and TOTAL." Wakefield decided to zoom in the 'O' and let the other letters wrap around the fold out CD insert. The letters also appear to wrap around from the back cover and the jewel case spine too.
Gavin Lucas @'CreativeReview'

Israel braces for border clashes in coming days

Police detain 7-year-old Palestinian boy and accost relatives, family members say

7 Good Reasons to Cry: The Healing Property of Tears

When Children’s Scribbles Hide a Prison Drug

Cape May County Sheriff's Department

Suboxone (hint: the fish) was hidden in this coloring book

Mike Barrett, a corrections officer, ripped open an envelope in the mail room at the Maine Correctional Center here and eyed something suspicious: a Father’s Day card, sent a month early. He carefully felt the card and slit it open, looking for a substance that has made mail call here a different experience of late.
Mr. Barrett and other prison officials nationwide are searching their facilities, mail and visitors for Suboxone, a drug used as a treatment for opiate addiction that has become coveted as contraband. Innovative smugglers have turned crushed Suboxone pills into a paste and spread it under stamps or over children’s artwork, including pages from a princess coloring book found in a New Jersey jail.
The drug also comes in thin strips, which dissolve under the tongue, that smugglers have tucked behind envelope seams and stamps.
“It’s become a crisis in here, to be honest with you,” said Maj. Francine Breton, administrator of the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Me. “It’s the drug of choice right now.”
Law enforcement officials say that Suboxone, which is prescribed to treat addiction to heroin and powerful painkillers like oxycodone, has become a drug of abuse in its own right, resulting in prison smuggling efforts from New Mexico to Maine. Addicts buy it on the street when they cannot find or afford their drug of choice, to stave off the sickness that comes with withdrawal. But some people are also taking it for the high they say it provides.
After Suboxone strips were discovered in two letters, the Cumberland County Jail set a new rule in March that all inmate mail must arrive in white envelopes. That way, Major Breton said, officials can detect the orange tint of the strips when they hold an envelope up to the light.
The jail also rips the stamps off every piece of mail before delivery because senders were putting a paste made of crushed Suboxone pills on the back of stamps for inmates to lick off...