The Pied Piper of Idiot Nation

What Ailes Us 

"We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered."

 

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

 

I first heard the name "Roger Ailes" over thirty years ago when  read the book by Joe McGinness, The Selling of the President 1968. It chronicled how a total unknown, then based out of Philadelphia, whose only claim to fame was as the producer of the Mike Douglas Show, went to work on the Richard Nixon presidential campaign. His job was to "repackage" a thoroughly unlikable candidate like Nixon and make him palatable to the voters of America via the method of media manipulation. It worked brilliantly. Although the election results against Hubert Humphrey that year were close enough to make Nixon's people sweat bullets, he was able to win. Through the use of television advertisements that they market-tested on select audiences before they were aired, they were able to present The Trickster as an amiable, all American kind of guy. I'm sure I don't need to remind you how nicely that worked out for America, do I.

Think about that: Roger's first exposure to the American people was his responsibility for the presidency of Richard Milhous Nixon. It all goes downhill from there. 

 

Roger and The Donald

I didn't experience any degree of schadenfreude this week when I learned about the passing of Roger Ailes. The details of his death were pretty depressing in-and-of themselves - killed after slipping on the tiled bathroom floor at his home in Florida. How the mighty have fallen. Only ten months before he had been on top of the world as the head of the empire he created almost single-handedly: Fox News - only to be forcibly dethrowned from his perch after it was revealed that he had been involved in the sexual harassment of scores of the leggy blonde news starlets that have been the staple of that organization for over two decades. The best line I read concerning Ailes' passing came from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi. When he mentioned to a relative that he was going to tackle this subject in his next piece, the "relative" (probably his father, NBC reporter Mike Taibbi) said to him, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."

FUN FACT:
It was Ailes, more than anyone, who was responsible for getting John Lennon to appear on the Mike Douglas Show in the late winter of 1972. There you have it: Other than the unintentional laughs mined from the occasional viewing of Fox Noise, that is the only positive fact regarding the man's entire career that I'm able to come up with.

 

Fox and "Friends"

No, I can't get too worked up over the death of Roger Ailes. The damage the old bugger did to the country he professed to love so well is too immense to be catalogued in this limited space. Fourteen years ago, at a time when an appalling number of Americans believed Saddam Hussein to be responsible for the carnage of September 11, 2001, polls proved conclusively that around seventy-five present of the citizenry who believed such nonsense described themselves as habitual viewers of Fox Noise. In addition to Dick Nixon's, Roger Ailes - more than anyone - may take credit for the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. He is not solely responsible for the atrocious dumbing-down of this doomed nation in the last fifty years, but he at least deserves a dishonorary mention. All of us today find ourselves stewing in the juices of Roger's sick vision. His success was due primarily to the fact that his entire career depended upon his appealing to the most appalling angels of the American nature. That's some legacy, huh?

He should have stuck with Mike Douglas. 

 

Tom Degan

Goshen, NY

 

SUGGESTED READING:

 

Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever

by Matt Taibbi

 

Here's a link to read Matt's assessment of the life and career of Roger Ailes, and the damage he did to this country:

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-roger-ailes-was-one-of-the-worst-americans-ever-w483013?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=051817_16 

 

Read it and weep.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

By the way, do you want to enjoy a really hardy laugh? Monday morning, tune into the first fifteen minutes of Fox and Friends. You must see it to believe it. It's that bad.