America Media Matters for - The fox effect: how roger ailes turned a network into a propaganda machine

David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt,
and Media Matters for America

The Fox Effect

David Brock, the founder and Chairman of Media Matters, is the author of five books, including TheRepublican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy and his bestselling memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

Ari Rabin-Havt is Media Matterss executive vice president.

www.mediamatters.org

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ANCHOR BOOKS

Free Ride: John McCain and the Media
by David Brock and Paul Waldman

AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2012

Copyright 2012 by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Cover design by Mark Abrams
Cover images: Jill Fromer (flag); ULTRA.f (tv) Photodisc/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brock, David.
The Fox effect: how Roger Ailes turned a network into a propaganda machine /
David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-94768-0
1. Ailes, Roger.2. Fox News.3. Television broadcasting of newsUnited States.
4. Television broadcasting of newsObjectivityUnited States.
5. Television and politicsUnited States.I. Rabin-Havt, Ari.II. Title.
PN4888.T4B76 2012
791.450973dc23
2011042839

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats. Theyre a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.

a former Fox employee

O n August 2, 2009, on board the Six-Star Luxury Liner Crystal Serenity, somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Fox Newss Washington, D.C., managing editor, Bill Sammon, rose to address supporters of Hillsdale College, a conservative institution located just over one hundred miles west of Detroit. His audience had paid between $11,800 and $37,600 per couple to listen to an all-star lineup of conservative journalists and scholars as they traveled from Venice to Athens, via Istanbul. Sammon was the featured speaker. He began with some joking remarks, speculating that conservative political consultant Mary Matalin, who was on board the ship simply on vacation, might have mischievously arranged to have her husband, liberal James Carville, along to save his ideological soul. Then Sammon made a startling admission:

At the time Sammon made these mischievous speculations, he was Fox Newss Washington deputy managing editor, and it was his job to oversee the reporting of the news on one of our countrys major cable networks. Yet here, in front of a friendly audience, on a luxury cruise an ocean away from the United States, he was candidly, nonchalantly admitting to consciously misrepresenting the ideology of a presidential candidate to Foxs audience days before an election.

Emails we obtained from that time, written by Sammon and a Fox producer, show that this calculated smear against Obama was not an on-air slip but part of a coordinated campaign of deception. Not only had Sammon personally appeared on the network to make these charges against Barack Obama, but he had also sent an email to journalists who worked for him, encouraging them to cover the Democratic candidates racial obsessions and supposed connections to Marxism.

From: Sammon, Bill

Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 1:02 PM

To: 069-Politics; 169-SPECIAL REPORT;
030-Root (FoxNews.Com)

Subject: fyi: Obamas references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. Plus a couple of his many self-described racial obsessions

• To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists. (Obama writing about his time at Occidental College in Dreams.)
• After his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University. He lived on Manhattans Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union, he recalled, adding: Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal.

• After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for a Ralph Nader offshoot in Harlem. In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia. At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature.

  During this period, according to Obama, he began a serious romantic relationship.

• There was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white, Obama wrote in Dreams. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. But Obama said their relationship was doomed by the racial difference. I pushed her away, he recalled. The emotion between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing from ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
• In June 1985, Obama was interviewed in New York by Marty Kaufman, a community organizer from Chicago. Obama recalled: There was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.

The next morning, Sammon appeared on the networks morning show, Fox & Friends, to reiterate his far-fetched theory about Obamas Marxism and racial obsessions. Memos from the shows producers reveal that the entire third segment was built around his email.

From: Cunningham, Jennifer

To: 044Web Show Producers; 064Desk Assignment; 069Politics; 081- Radio; 085DC Booking;
100Media Relations; 162Promos; Brown, David; Glick, Alexis; Magee, Kevin; Moody, John; Scott, Suzanne; Shine, Bill; Tammero, Michael; Wallace, Jay

Sent: Mon Oct 27 18:17:41 2008

Subject: FOX & FRIENDS GUESTS FOR TUESDAY OCTOBER. 28
EXACTLY 1 WEEK BEFORE ELECTION DAY
FOX & FRIENDS GUESTS FOR TUESDAY OCTOBER. 28EXACTLY 1 WEEK BEFORE ELECTION DAY
5:59 (A-BLOCK) COLD OPEN // QUICK TEASE// News HEADLINES // TALKING POINTS WX BUMP OUT TO TEASE
6:15 (B-BLOCK)2 STORIES AMANDA CARPENTER
DEMS PLAYBOOK SHOWS DIRTY TACTICS
((DC BUREAU))