Related:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/getting-to-maybe
JUNE 24, 2013
Fox News has notably changed its tone since the election. A Democratic policy staffer who worked on the issue in 2007 and has helped write the current bill said, “NumbersUSA and FAIR” - two groups that want to dramatically limit immigration - “managed to convince Fox News back then to be their twenty-four-hour news channel of the anti-immigrant point of view. Fox has now totally bought in to the idea that we just need to figure something out.” Rush Limbaugh, who fiercely opposes the bill, has come to sound resigned. “I don’t know if there’s any stopping this,” he said on January 28th, the day the Gang held the press conference announcing its framework for the legislation. “It’s up to me and Fox News, and I don’t think Fox News is that invested in this.”
McCain told me, “Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too.” Murdoch is the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corp., which owns Fox, and Ailes is Fox News’s president. McCain said that he, Graham, Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto, who are now relatively sympathetic to the Gang’s proposed bill. Hannity voiced support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which he previously dismissed as “amnesty,” on the day after the 2012 election. “God bless Fox,” Graham said. “Last time, it was ‘amnesty’ every fifteen seconds.” He said that the change was important for his reëlection, because “eighty per cent of people in my primary get their news from Fox.” He added that the network has “allowed critics to come forward, but it’s been so much better.”
good find...revealing!
Obviously, there was a lot of schmoozing and wooing going on between 2011-2013.
Also interesting is what framing/positioning/posturing occurred around the 2012 election.