Posted on 01/17/2010 9:18:59 AM PST by Steelfish
Roger Ailes Is The Real Head Of The GOP
Howard Fineman Newsweek Published Jan 15, 2010
I've been trying to answer this question: does the Republican Party have a "leader"? Surely it's not Michael Steele, the loose-lipped chairman of the RNC. Not Mitch McConnell, the funereal Kentuckian who heads the Senate's rejectionist GOP minority. Not Sen. John McCain; he's too busy watching his own right flank back home in Arizona. And certainly not the Bushes, elder and younger, hunkered down in Texas. As for the 2012 wannabes, none gets more than a fifth of the GOP vote in the early polls.
But I finally found my answer while I was watching Fox News Channel. Last Wednesday, the other news outlets were engaged in wall-to-wall, on-the-ground coverage of the horrific earthquake in Haiti. FNC, meanwhile, featured an hourlong Glenn Beck sit-down with Sarah Palin, Fox's newest "analyst," and wall-to-wall, on-the-ground coverage of the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, where a Republican, Scott Brown, seemed to be closing in fast on what was once Ted Kennedy's seat. "All eyes are on the Senate race in Massachusetts!" said Sean Hannity, who did his best to make it seem as though he believed it.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
I think you've got it!
Newsweek, Trashcan
I remember when Roger Ailes had his own talk show on (believe it or not) MSNBC.
It was pretty good-and he often had the incomparable Anne Hampton Calloway (singer-pianist) on. She once even performed a song she composed about Roger Ailes.
Great TV-too bad Ailes doesn’t revive his show on Fox!
I was just at the dentist office last week.
Glenn Beck was on the TV and National Review was on the coffee table; no Newsweak in sight.
You bet we are! :)
I met Roger Ailes about 24 years ago, when I was buying & selling video equipment. He was in charge, or at least an exec at Universal Studios in LA, and was running the Star Trek attraction where people could get dressed up in Star Trek costumes and sit on a set and have their images chroma-keyed into various Star Trek vignettes. It was good fun, and the pile of equipment needed was pretty large. Anyway, my deal with him was to replace 1 of his existing Sony 3/4” videotape recorders, value about $17K at the time (value about ZERO now, LOL) with a brand new one which was a player-only (didn’t record) value about $13.5K and the hard part was that Universal didn’t want to spend a penny on the deal, which was a challenge because somewhere there had to be a sales tax outlay on the brand new machine. The other challenge was that I didn’t have $13K to “float” the new machine while I figured out a way to sell the take-out machine.
The long and short of it was that I worked it all out, Entertainment Tonight (located on the Paramount lot but not Paramount) bought the old machine, Univ got the new machine for not a penny in outlay, Mr. Ailes congratulated me for on working the whole thing out without costing him anything, and was totally friendly & cooperative throughout the whole thing.
Those were great dealmaking days.
Good memory, and a good story, Attention Surplus Disorder!
That Ailes was impressed with your deal-making skills should not come as a surprise, based on his ability to take Fox from almost-nothing in terms of ratings to #1; and since he left MSNBC, well, we know what their ratings are!!
(BTW, in my earlier post I misspelled Ann Hampton Callaway’s name. Sorry!)
“..his ability to take Fox from almost-nothing in terms of ratings to #1...”
I admire the blazes out of the guy, and adding Sarah as a commentator (and who knows what else in the future) is utter genius. And I would say that even if I disliked SP!
There was a story I saw that said Roger Ailes has bodyguards and travels in a convoy of SUVs for protection. He needs to. He drives the left crazy.
Newsweak is a full fledged DNC spokesmouth. Its so partisan for liberal democrats that its not even a question now.
I respect Ailes talent a lot. To me, though, he's in it for the money and the thrill of beating the competition. I honestly don't think politics has much to do with it. He's doing it because it's good business.
Ailes is almost 70. Does he play much of a role in the day to day operations of FNC?
Nope. It's not Ailes, Sarah, Rush, Levin, Hannity...etc.
It's grass roots, common sense America that's leading the charge to take back the GOP and the country.
And the Tea Party People, every day Americans who turned out in Washington and the town hall meetings to challenge all these bills that the Obama Administration started.
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