New C-SPAN series, Q & A.
What's the gist? This isn't the first time C-SPAN has done interviews? Any call-in or emailed questions? I wonder.

Well, this week's session with Roger Ailes starts in about 5 minutes here on the East. Rebroadcast at 11pm. I may catch it then.

Jon
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ABOUT Q&A

C-SPAN's New Interview Series

Every Sunday night, we will introduce you to interesting people who are making things happen in politics, the media, education, and science & technology in hour-long conversations about their lives and their work.

Roger Ailes is one intense guy.  He does not look like he suffers fools well.  His resentment of lesser talented elites is palpable.  Like other conservatives at the top of their game, he acts as if he was an underdog or an abused minority. 

He and his fellow right wingers were shunned by the beautiful people at the awards conventions and private parties.  Ailes hasn't forgotten.
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LAMB: What evidence did you have at that school that the teachers did not like America?

AILES: Everything is negative. Everything is about -- look, 95 percent of our people are working, the other 5 percent are basically pretty well taken care of by the government. Health care is not bad here. Bill Clinton did all right under it. Most people who want surgery don’t go to Canada, they try to come here. This is country where everybody is trying to get in and nobody is trying get out.

So it just occurs to me that some of that ought to be taught in context. Not that we don’t have problems, not that we don’t have deep problems in our cities, poverty and some other things, but this is the society that has cured and will continue to cure many of those problems. And I think that the context of all that has to be taught. And I don’t see it being taught.

So, bravely sticking to the mandate of C-SPAN discussion only...
I'd be curious what other people's choice of follow-up questions would be.

Jon
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Er...Is this another C-SPAN only thread? 

Q & A is Brian Lamb's baby, and I seriously doubt he will field follow-up questions from the peanut gallery.  Q & A is Booknotes without Brian having to read anything. 

LAMB: What evidence did you have at that school that the teachers did not like America?

AILES: Everything is negative. Everything is about -- look, 95 percent of our people are working, the other 5 percent are basically pretty well taken care of by the government. Health care is not bad here. Bill Clinton did all right under it. Most people who want surgery don’t go to Canada, they try to come here. This is country where everybody is trying to get in and nobody is trying get out.

Following his defeat in the 1960s election against John F. Kennedy, [Richard] Nixon set out to reinvent himself, hiring professional image manipulators including William Safire, then a New York public relations executive; advertising executives H.R. Haldeman and Harry Treleaven; and television producer Roger Ailes (currently the head of Fox News). Long before Bill Clinton played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show or Arnold Schwarzenegger traded quips with Jay Leno, Nixon paved the way by appearing on the comedy show Laugh-In to say "Sock it to me" as part of his 1968 campaign strategy for overcoming his humorless image.

Before Roger Ailes met Nixon, he was an executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show, a popular TV talk and variety program. They met in 1967, while Nixon was waiting to appear as a guest on the show. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Nixon said.

"Television is not a gimmick," Ailes replied, and Nixon hired him.

The problem for the Nixon campaign, Ailes said, is that "a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he's a bore, a pain in the ass. They think he's the kind of kid who always carried a book bag. . . . Now you put him on television, you've got a problem right away. He's a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody put him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to be President.' I mean this is how he strikes some people."

To change this image, the campaign paid to produce a series of television shows, in which Nixon fielded questions from panels of citizens. Although the shows were broadcast live, both the audiences and the panel were prescreened by the campaign, chosen carefully to have the right demographics--just enough blacks, for example, but not too many. Panel members were chosen so they would ask just enough tough questions to make the shows feel spontaneous, and since the audience was all Republican, applause was guaranteed.

"The audience is part of the show," Ailes said during a discussion with Harry Treleaven about whether to allow reporters to watch the tapings. "And that's the whole point. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set. And goddammit, Harry, the problem is that this is an electronic election. The first there's ever been. TV has the power now. Some of the guys get arrogant and rub the reporters' faces in it and then the reporters get pissed and go out of their way to rap anything they consider staged for TV. And you know damn well that's what they'd do if they saw this from the studio. You let them in there with the regular audience and they see the warmup. They see Jack Rourke [the show's warm-up man] out there telling the audience to applaud and to mob Nixon at the end, and that's all they'd write about it."

In 1968, Nixon's success in reinventing himself as the "New Nixon" helped him win the White House. When journalist Joe McGinniss detailed this strategy the next year in The Selling of the President, shamefaced reporters vowed to get wise to such manipulation, but the Nixon campaign was just the beginning. Although his impeachment in the Watergate scandal meant a temporary setback, the Republicans roared back into the White House in 1980 with Ronald Reagan, the first actor ever to become president. Reagan also relied on the talents of Ailes, who served as a consultant to his 1984 re-election campaign. Ailes oversaw production of the now legendary "Morning in America" campaign television ads, designed by Madison Avenue executive Philip Dusenberry and featuring swelling violin music and emotional, issue-free imagery of weddings, flag-raising, home-buying and peaceful, scenic vistas.

Ailes used a similar strategy in 1988, when he worked with Lee Atwater to mastermind George H.W. Bush's come-from-behind victory over Michael Dukakis. The Bush/Quayle '88 campaign combined morning-in-America imagery with ads that ridiculed Dukakis through deceptive visual imagery. One TV spot took Dukakis to task for pollution in Boston Harbor, displaying a sign that said, "Danger/Radiation Hazard/No Swimming." The sign actually had nothing to do with pollution or Dukakis. It was posted to warn Navy personnel not to swim in waters that had once harbored nuclear submarines under repair.

The most egregious ads, however, used visual imagery to exploit racial feelings. One featured a threatening photograph of William Horton, a black inmate who had escaped from a prison-furlough program and raped a woman, to suggest that Dukakis was unusually soft on crime. (Actually, Massachusetts was one of 45 states with prison furlough programs at the time of Horton's crime.) A second prison-furlough ad depicted a "revolving door" through which a line of white men entered prison, while blacks and Hispanics exited. "That phrase 'revolving-door prison policy' implies, of course, that Massachusetts criminals could, thanks to Governor Dukakis, slip out of jail as easily as commuters streaming from a subway station," observes Mark Crispin Miller. "But the image makes an even more inflammatory statement. . . . The 'revolving door' effects an eerie racial metamorphosis, implying that the Dukakis prison system was not only porous, but a satanic source of negritude--a dark 'liberal' mill that took white men and made them colored."

From "Banana Republicans, Pumping Irony," By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, May 2004

http://www.counterpunch.org/stauber05272004.html

Fox's founder and president, Roger Ailes, was for decades one of the savviest and most pugnacious Republican political operatives in Washington, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan campaigns. Ailes is most famous for his role in crafting the elder Bush's media strategy in the bruising 1988 presidential race. With Ailes' help, Bush turned a double-digit deficit in the polls into a resounding win by targeting the GOP's base of white male voters in the South and West, using red-meat themes like Michael Dukakis' "card-carrying" membership in the ACLU, his laissez-faire attitude toward flag-burning, his alleged indifference to the pledge of allegiance--and, of course, paroled felon Willie Horton.

Described by fellow Bush aide Lee Atwater as having "two speeds--attack and destroy," Ailes once jocularly told a Time reporter (8/22/88): "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it." Later, as a producer for Rush Limbaugh's short-lived TV show, he was fond of calling Bill Clinton the "hippie president" and lashing out at "liberal bigots" (Washington Times, 5/11/93). It is these two sensibilities above all--right-wing talk radio and below-the-belt political campaigning--that Ailes brought with him to Fox, and his stamp is evident in all aspects of the network's programming.

http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html

Before Roger Ailes met Nixon, he was an executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show, a popular TV talk and variety program. They met in 1967, while Nixon was waiting to appear as a guest on the show. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Nixon said.

"Television is not a gimmick," Ailes replied, and Nixon hired him.
The problem for the Nixon campaign, Ailes said, is that "a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he's a bore, a pain in the ass. They think he's the kind of kid who always carried a book bag. . . . Now you put him on television, you've got a problem right away. He's a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody put him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to be President.' I mean this is how he strikes some people."

And you know, I happened to run into Nixon, because he was on "The Mike Douglas Show," and he happened to be on the same day that Little Egypt was on, she was a belly dancer and she had a boa constrictor. And so one of the guys came to me and he said, well, my God, we’ve got former Vice President Nixon coming into the front door. We’ve got Little Egypt with a boa constrictor in the green room. What do you want to do? I said, I don’t want to scare him and I don’t want to scare the snake. Let’s put them in separate rooms. This is a true story. So they put the -- Nixon in my office. I was 28 years old. I came back one day, up for rehearsal, and he says, "that’s too bad a guy has to rely on a gimmick to get elected." I said, if you think television is a gimmick, you’re going to lose again. That’s what I said to him, I didn’t know him. And Len Garment, who later became a close friend of mine and a great lawyer from Washington, worked for him, and he called me and asked me to come and brief his people, and would I be interested in producing some television?
http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1001

Sorry, AV, I do not agree with your view. There was a fundamental difference in the interest and intent.

I do not accept that it is just tit for tat and fair is fair.

Michael Moore might amount to that.

It is slightly insane that Roger Ailes is head of such a powerful network, though perfect that he is head of Rupert Murdoch's American broadcast empire.

Journalistically, it is a travesty.

In my view.
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AILES: .. they talk to each other about us, and they think that really hurts our feelings. I taught a class up at Columbia, I go up and look at Columbia. Walk into the International School at Columbia and look at the books that are required reading for the students: 100 percent anti-American. Capitalism is no good…

You can't force Ailes to play by Columbia School of Journalism rules.  He hates those guys anyway, and will break their rules just to drive them crazy. 

From Q&A
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I can't force business or community leaders to play by ethical rules that are much larger than law.

That does not mean I don't have to pretend they don't matter, or that everything is the same thing, or that everything is good or equally good or bad.

I'm sure not going to play patsy to his clever (and largely successful) efforts to tie the rest of us nine ways to Sunday in fatuousness.
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Nicely said, but on a practical level the "responsible" media is getting creamed by Ailes and his ethically ambiguous tactics. 

The public likes biased journalism, and Fox is openly practicing partisan journalism, and folks like Arturo are convinced that the other networks are practicing subrosa biased journalism. 

My point is, Columbia School rules don't  matter.  I don't know how it can be reigned in from where it is now.
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Nicely said, but on a practical level the "responsible" media is getting creamed by Ailes and his ethically ambiguous tactics. 

The public likes biased journalism, and Fox is openly practicing partisan journalism, and folks like Arturo are convinced that the other networks are practicing subrosa biased journalism. 

My point is, Columbia School rules don't  matter.  I don't know how it can be reigned in from where it is now.
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There is no "responsible" media.  You're responsible for finding varied news sources because no one source is going to be free from mistakes of inclusion and exclusion as well as outright bias.
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Is that how the founders envisioned it?
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I doubt they invisioned a hundredth of what we have now. It would be soooo cool to bring back Washington to see what the US has in the way of press and technology. I can't imagine GW being anything less than floored by BET alone.
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But they envision people being responsible for finding their own news sources?
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