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John Amato

John Amato

Posted: January 20, 2010 08:17 PM

Fox News has almost every Republican presidential candidate for 2012 on its payroll. Are they the Kingmakers?

What's Your Reaction:

The fair and balanced network has a little problem, I believe, and one that the media never seem to address. If they are just another news organization and are defended by Howard Kurtz and Jake Tapper as such, then why do they employ almost the entire field of Republican presidential candidates for 2012?

At this point in time the leading candidates for the GOP nomination are:

Mitt Romney.

Mike Huckabee.

Sarah Palin.

Newt Gingrich:


So far Romney isn't on the Fox News dole yet, but how long will it be before he gets his own time slot in some form before 2012 rolls along? Huckabee has his own one hour show on weekends, Sarah Palin juts got hired and is making the rounds on the FNC shows so she can be trained for the future, and Newt is a fixture on the network as the conservative basher-in-chief and thought to be the next Reagan by some of their hosts.

Let's not forget that they immediately hired Karl Rove as their master strategist when he left George W. Bush's side.

This is just plain wrong in so many ways. And the media remains silent except for quick mentions about it.
Howard Fineman rightly calls Ailes a "kingmaker" and you can see that that's his goal.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum--which is why God created Roger Ailes. The president of Fox News is, by default, the closest thing there is to a kingmaker in Anti-Obama America. And that, in turn, makes him the de facto leader of the GOP. In a relentless (and spectacularly successful) hunt for cable ratings, Ailes has given invaluable publicity to the tea partiers, furnished tryout platforms to GOP candidates, and trained a fire hose of populist anger at the president and his allies in Congress. While Beltway Republicans wring their hands or write their tracts, Ailes has worked the countryside, using his feel for Main Street resentment to attract and give voice to this year's angriest--and most powerful--voter-viewers: those who hate the Feds, the Fed, and the Ivy League. It was Ailes who put the "party" in the tea parties by giving them a round-the-clock national stage. Next month Fox will have priority access to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

Ailes already has been leading the charge to tear down President Obama and has been very successful at that so far. In a year they have changed the political narrative when conservatism and the GOP were in shambles and the country was in meltdown. They were aided by a horrendous economy created by Bush and his conservative cronies of course that Obama inherited. The president has also left his base in the dark too, but FOX News is a real threat to the democratic process in America. PERIOD. I'm not just talking about having a conservative point of view. They created an entire political movement called the tea party movement and not a word from the media about this. Even on TV today, pundits and pols call them a wild card in politics, but that's silly, They make Newt Gingrich look like a moderate republican. When has a media outlet ever turned into an activist organization for one political party and recruited members by sending their hosts on location to do so?

I haven't heard the media complain either that FOX is the only network that has access to the teabagger convention. Once again the Aile's machine chugs along and our country suffers for it as the MSM remains mute.

 

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12:04 PM on 01/24/2010
Hmm. Interesting that there isn't a peep in this article about the sheer number of people who were in the inner circle of some very high profile Dems who are on the payrolls of networks. Only the usual hypocritical selective outrage over the ONE news network that isn't in lockstep with all the others in their love affair for all things Obama! Unlike said Dems, none of those on Fox (with the exception of Mike Huckabee) hosts a show, but we have or have had the likes of the late Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, James Carville, Paull Begala, and George Stephanopolis have all HOSTED shows on the various other news and/or cable news networks.

And don't forget the many news media 'journalists' who are now working directly for Obama. of course, they are merely extensions of the news networks and channels that do the very same thing, with the exception (thankfully) of Fox. A link about them is below...

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/shocker_13_mainstream_media_journalists_have_now_gone_to_work_for_obama/
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jsgaetano
Semper Fidelis Tyrannosaurus!
10:50 AM on 01/27/2010
Like all right wing comments, this makes no sense at all.

You are comparing writers getting work with the President as equivalent to one news station employing EVERY presidential candidate for one political party? Really? Are Goopers that insane?
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10:19 AM on 01/24/2010
From: www.washingtonmonthly.com

"CBS News's "Face the Nation" is touting its line-up for it's up coming show. Coming Up: Jan. 24, 2010: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill".

For those keeping score, this will be McCain's 19th appearance on a Sunday morning talk show since Obama took office 12 months ago. That's an average of one appearance every 2.9 weeks for a year -- more than any other public official in the country.

Since the president's inauguration McCain has been on:
- "Meet the Press" three times (December 6, July 12, and March 29)
- "This Week" three times (September 27, August 23, and May 10)
- "Fox News Sunday" four times (December 20, July 2, March 8, and January 25)
- CNN's "State of the Union" four times (January 10, October 11, August 2, and February 15).

His appearance on "Face the Nation" will be his fifth in the last year (January 24, October 25, August 30, April 26, and February 8).
----------

The question is WHY? He is just an out of touch old man who is trying to be relevant but who is clueless on so many fronts.
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LMPE
I connect the most dissimilar things
03:27 PM on 01/23/2010
I wonder what percentage of Faux News's viewership (and employees) believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
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solopico
Common Sense is Not So Common Anymore
06:51 PM on 01/22/2010
Interesting... I hadn't heard anyone announce candidacy yet, with the only close exception being Tim Pawlenty.

CNN gathered up all the former Clinton workers, advisers, etc. except D. Morris - do you take issue with that as well?

Will it bother you when everyone from Obama's team goes to MSNBC in 2012 after he loses?

Sheesh..
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ProfessorDuh
10:40 PM on 01/22/2010
No, it bothers me that Fox News LIES and does so CONSTANTLY.
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DRaymond
Network administrator, voiceovers
02:40 PM on 01/22/2010
Fox controlls access by politicians to their likely supporters. It is as simple as that. One guest spot on Fox gets a politician more face time with more potential national supporters than millions of dollars spent on appearances.

So why do certain politicians get so much exposure and others so little? Ron Paul was a bigger presence in the last election than Huckabee, but how come he is hardly ever seen there? It is because his form of conservatism doesn't mesh with Ailles'.

Where would the so-called tea-party movement be right now if Fox hadn't provided it wall-to-wall promotion in the weeks before and put up maps saying 'go here to see your favorite fox news personalities!'


Fox News isn't simply using its access to be the kingmaker, it is using its entire staff to dictate the political agenda of the Republican party.
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ProfessorDuh
05:43 PM on 01/22/2010
Sean Hannity actually RAN from Ron Paul supporters, like the cow ardly little chick enhawk he is.
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10:08 AM on 01/24/2010
There is really not much difference between Faux and the other so-called news networks. It is obvious that they are bias towards the republicans.

Crooks and Liars posted the Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread
crooksandliars.com

ABC's "This Week" - White House senior adviser David Axelrod; Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: David Brooks, Savannah Guthrie, Clarence Page and Kathleen Parker. Topics: Will Obama Recalibrate His Agenda In Response To Voter Outrage? White Flight: Why Have Working Class Whites Abandoned Obama?

CNN's "State of the Union" - Axelrod; Menendez; Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

The thing about this lineup is that the republicans get to end the show with their unquestioned lies. Dems are always appear in the first part of these shows.

Crooks and Liars asks the question: Notice a trend?

BTW, if Working Class Whites have Abandoned President Obama in favor of the republicans then they deserve what they will get.
12:07 PM on 01/22/2010
Look a template!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8471961.stm
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ProfessorDuh
10:47 AM on 01/22/2010
An article on FoxNews.com, marked as updated on January 7, 2010, asserted that a volcanic eruption "killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet 250 million years ago." So Fox News made the dinosaurs extinct before they evolved, a neat trick. This kind of glaring misinformation is typical of this national news network because when you're a propagandist, facts don't matter too much.
Fox News also presented a graphic showing that the Lincoln-Douglas Debates were between Abraham Lincoln and the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
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GeorgeBurnsWasRight
My micro-bio is running on empty.
12:25 PM on 01/22/2010
"killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet"

So THAT'S why there's so few walking plants these days! Fox is so informative.
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ProfessorDuh
10:40 AM on 01/22/2010
Reporting on a Washington 9-12 rally he promoted in 2009, Glenn Beck rejected the crowd estimate of 70,000 offered by city authorities. Instead, he said, an amazing 1.7 MILLION people attended, citing a supposed study by the University of I Don’t Remember.
"We had a university, the university, I think it's the University of -- I don't remember which university it is -- um, look at the pictures," Beck said.
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ProfessorDuh
10:40 AM on 01/22/2010
Here’s Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Feb. 6, 2008: “I'm also hearing a lot of people are waiting for Senator McCain to snap; for him to do something cra zy and that just as he's on the verge of winning this, he's gonna go, you know, kinda like a Norman Bates deal.†That was when Fox News was still instructed to destroy John McCain, before they were instructed to deify him as the Republican nominee
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ProfessorDuh
10:35 AM on 01/22/2010
Fox News star Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that WWII U.S. troops had committed atrocities at Malmedy as an attempt to justify contemporary atrocities by U.S. troops, then had Malmedy changed to "Normandy" in the transcript in a clumsy attempt to cover up his tracks.
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ProfessorDuh
10:34 AM on 01/22/2010
Rewriting history on Aug. 6, 2008, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade denied that Bush ever tried to tie Al Qaeda to Iraq to justify his invasion, flatly stating that Bush "never even said there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq." On June 17, 2004, Bush told the press, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
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ProfessorDuh
10:34 AM on 01/22/2010
On Aug, 6, 2009, Fox News star Glenn Beck "joked" that he'd like to mu rder Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by pois oning her tea, then had the transcript scrubbed to hide his statement.
Fox News pundit Liz Trotta, while discussing the idea of assa ssinating Osama Bin Laden and Barack Obama, said, "Well ... both, if we could!, " then laughed happily.
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ProfessorDuh
10:23 AM on 01/22/2010
Fox News displays anopen contempt for facts because it is a fasclst propaganda machine, and I mean that literally. Fox does not practice journalism. It SUBVERTS journalism. It is the Fourth Estate's Fifth Column.
As Joseph Goebbels observed, "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is, in fact, a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded to clothe ideas in disguise."
In a world now ruined by the Bush-Republican-corporate policies for which the Fox News served as head cheerleader, THAT is the mission of Fox "News."
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24hourrifle
A time comes when silence is betrayal
08:43 AM on 01/22/2010
for all the legitimate criticism of fnc,the bit about the teaparties is the most troubling by far....

these people-the teabagged,as well as the fnc personalities-still truly believe that its a grass roots movement.and they get wildly bent out of shape if anyone suggests otherwise.they honestly believe that fnc actually running ads(they RAN F'ING ADS!!) had no effect on their angry little intellectual hoedowns...
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Carolyn LeBeauf
09:55 PM on 01/21/2010
With the ruling fron the supreme court today Murdock will on the congress, every tv station, internet and every news paper in this country. Get ready for it, some day Murdock will be the president of the U S.