Mar. 6, 2013
10:57 am
Vanity Fair excerpts Zev Chafets’s biography of Roger Ailes:
For months, Roger Ailes and I had been meeting regularly at Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, at his home in Putnam County, and at public and private gatherings. In that time I got a closer look at Roger Ailes than any journalist who doesn’t work for him ever has. He is plainspoken, wryly profane, caustic, and above all competitive …
[News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch often drops by Ailes’s office to joke and gossip about politics. “Roger and I have a close personal friendship,” he told me. Ailes agrees—up to a point.
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Zev Chafets, Vanity Fair book excerpt
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 27, 2013
12:10 pm
Center for Public Integrity |
OpenSecrets.org
News Corp's political action committee
gave 52 percent of its donations during the 2012 election cycle to Democratic candidates, reports Dave Levinthal. The donations provide "a notable, if not striking contrast with Fox News' conservative reputation," Levinthal writes.
In January, News America-FOXPAC gave money to five Democratic candidates and no money to Republicans, though it "contributed $15,000 in January to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which may by law accept significantly larger contributions than candidate committees," Levinthal writes.
Prominent Democrats receiving News America-FOXPAC cash last election cycle included Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, as well as House Minority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Feb. 11, 2013
2:57 pm
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Julie Moos
Feb. 6, 2013
4:58 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 10, 2012
9:41 am
The Huffington Post |
Daily Kos
A study that claimed Fox News viewers were significantly less intelligent than average Americans
is a hoax, Michael Giltz writes. The "study" was ordered up by a group of conservatives who hope to move the Republican party in a more moderate direction, lead hoaxer "P. Nichols" told Giltz.
Making people embarrassed to say they watched FOX News (or better yet not watch FOX News at all) might help that goal. So the 5000 people who took part in the study were chosen by Nichols and non-scientists, essentially selected to guarantee the results they were looking for.
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Jeff Sonderman
Dec. 4, 2012
10:26 am
The Washington Post | Fox News
Bob Woodward reports that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes had a Fox analyst visiting Afghanistan deliver a message to Gen. David Petraeus in 2011 -- that the general should demand to be appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or else resign and run for president.
From Woodward's
scoop:
The Fox News chairman’s message was delivered to Petraeus by Kathleen T. McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst and former national security and Pentagon aide in three Republican administrations. She did so at the end of a 90-minute, unfiltered conversation with Petraeus that touched on the general’s future, his relationship with the media and his political aspirations — or lack thereof. The Washington Post has obtained a digital recording from the meeting, which took place in Petraeus’s office in Kabul.
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Andrew Beaujon
Nov. 19, 2012
3:50 pm
Pew
During the last week of the 2012 presidential campaign, Fox News and MSNBC both took a dramatically negative tone toward President Obama and Mitt Romney, respectively.
68 percent of MSNBC's coverage of Romney was negative during from Oct. 29-Nov. 5, up from 57 percent in October. That doesn't sound too surprising, except that Pew found 5 percent of MSNBC's Romney coverage was positive from Oct. 1-28, while it found
no positive coverage of Romney when it looked at the final week's stories. It also found no negative coverage of Obama.
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Andrew Beaujon
Nov. 7, 2012
11:40 am
Tampa Bay Times |
The New York Times |
Slate |
The Washington Post |
The Atlantic Wire
After Fox called Ohio for President Obama Tuesday night, Karl Rove challenged the network's decision, leading to the unusual sight of anchor Megyn Kelly being filmed walking through Fox's corridors to interview people at the network's decision desk. I couldn't find one clip of the whole episode, but here it is in three parts:
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Julie Moos
Sep. 21, 2012
1:43 pm
"Rock Center" |
Greta Van Susteren
In two segments Thursday night on "Rock Center," Ted Koppel spoke with Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and David Carr about the business of broadcasting hate.
Fox brings in a billion dollars a year, Carr told Koppel. It caters, he said, to viewers who feel like, "we're here in the bunker, they're after us."
Coulter would not stipulate that civil discourse has coarsened. "Back when you thought we were living in peace and harmony, we just felt like we were under attack," she told Koppel.
“The bar for civility on cable television and talk radio has fallen so low,” Koppel said, “that by comparison [Bill] O'Reilly seems almost reasonable.”
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Julie Moos
July 8, 2012
9:48 am
SCOTUSblog
In an exhaustive account, SCOTUSblog publisher and co-founder Tom Goldstein describes, minute by minute,
how CNN and Fox News initially misreported the Supreme Court ruling on the health care law:
Here's what happened at 10:07:20, Goldstein reports:
The CNN and Fox producers are scanning the syllabus. Eight lines from the bottom of page 2, they see the following language: “Chief Justice Roberts concluded in Part III-A that the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause.” They immediately and correctly recognize that sentence as fantastically important. The individual mandate is the heart of the statute, and it is clear that the Court has rejected the Administration’s principal theory – indeed the only theory that was discussed at great length in the oral arguments and debated by commentators.
Into his conference call, the CNN producer says (correctly) that the Court has held that the individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause, and (incorrectly) that it therefore “looks like” the mandate has been struck down. The control room asks whether they can “go with” it, and after a pause, he says yes.
The Fox producer reads the syllabus exactly the same way, and reports that the mandate has been invalidated. Asked to confirm that the mandate has been struck down, he responds: “100%.”
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