Mr. Sunshine
Fox News head Roger Ailes gave a college lecture to aspiring young journalists on Thursday. It was full of the sort of advice that makes Fox News
what it is today.
Too many aspiring journalists want to affect politics or are on a mission to “change the world or save the world,” [...] “If you want to bring world peace or save starving children – both very noble goals – the way to affect that as a journalist is to investigate why the United Nations is so ineffective at doing either of those even though they get 22 percent of their budget from the American taxpayers,” Ailes said. “They seem to have trouble bringing peace, and they seem to have trouble feeding people, so we need to question that.”
Yeah! There are still wars and hungry people, so stop trying. In fact, stop caring at all. Caring about stuff is for jerks and liberals.
He made sure to position himself as defender of freedoms and bulwark against tyranny:
“What you’re really telling me is that there’s a little cable channel over here that’s driving you nuts because it won’t line up with your worldview,” Ailes said. “… Remember, the last time all of us got lined up together, we were lined up by two guys – Hitler and Stalin. If there’s an alternative point of view, don’t wet your pants.”
And demonstrated the Fox News commitment to proudly lying your ass off, even in situations where there would seem to be little point to it:
He claimed Thursday that the channel has never had to retract a story for inaccuracies[.]
Except for those
all those times it did, he neglected to add.
The one bit of actual news, though, was this:
[Ailes] threw a jab at Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, asserting that the candidate has only criticized Fox News’ coverage because he’s “trying to get a job at CNN because he knows he isn’t going to get to come back to Fox News.”
So Ailes is saying here that even
before Newt Gingrich started grumping about Fox News being in the tank for Mitt Romney, he knew he wasn't going to "get to come back to Fox News." I'm not sure what he's referring to here; I can't think of any big fallout between Newt and Fox before this point, at least nothing that would have gotten him blackballed from the network. So either Ailes is talking about something that happened behind the scenes, or he's lying his ass off. From what I know of Newt's ego and Roger's ethics, I'm not sure which of those is more likely.