I mentioned in this post that after the tragedy in Tucson, certain folks put it on themselves to be the real victims. A number of people backed up those claims, and all of these victims work for the same guy, Roger Ailes.
This always-the-victim-and-therefore-above-reproach approach that Fox News takes comes directly from the guy who runs it.
The full expose on Roger Ailes is here. Please make sure his son reads it (and read it to find out why this is so important.) It’s a really well written piece, take it all the way to the end, makes the same point I did in the title here.
The following anecdote covers pretty much the entire personality of Ailes and the news network he created and controls.
But what if Roger Ailes is a powerful man because he really is different from other powerful men? What if Roger Ailes really does have to win every fight because every fight is a matter of life and death? So listen again to an average American story from an average American childhood, and ask if Roger Ailes is an average American after all:When he was a baby, he fell out of his crib. He split his lip and he bled. A lot of babies do the same thing. But Roger kept on bleeding. Remember, this was seventy years ago. There was hardly anything known about hemophilia back then. And there was certainly not much that could be done about it, except transfusions of whole blood. “Well, you died. That’s what you knew about it. I was told many times I wasn’t going to make it.”
The closest he came to dying was when he was seven or eight. He bit his tongue when he jumped off the roof of the garage. His mouth filled with blood and the blood would not stop, the blood soaked the sheets of his bed, and he heard the doctor tell his father that there was nothing he could do. Roger Ailes was going to bleed out through his tongue. But his father was a fighter; that is, he got into fights, and Roger admired him for it. Now he fought for his son’s life. He picked Roger up, swaddled in bloody bedclothes, and drove him to the Cleveland Clinic with a police escort. At the factory where he worked, the old man tracked down everybody who had type-O-positive blood, and now he called upon all of them to come to Cleveland for his son. They did, and Roger can still remember their names, Dirtyneck Watson and the rest, men filthy from work who lined up one after another to give Roger their blood, arm to arm. ” ‘Well, son, you have a lot of blue-collar blood in you, never forget that,’ my father said after I got through it, and I never have. A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.”
But he was never that kid, not really. He couldn’t be. The disease he had was the Royal Disease, the disease of Queen Victoria’s progeny, a disease considered effete, a mortal taint. He used to have to sit on a pillow at school. He wasn’t able to go out at recess. And so one day he asked his parents to let him walk to school, like the other kids, and they let him. “And some guys beat me up. I went home a little beat up and my dad, I saw tears in his eyes for the first time. I’d never seen it. And he said, ‘That’s never going to happen to you again.’ He taught me how to fight. And he told me to stay away from any fight that I could. ‘But if you have no options, then remember, son, for them it’s a fight. For you, it’s life and death.’ ”
Everybody bleeds. We bleed all the time. We bleed when we move, we bleed when we bump into things. But for many years — there wasn’t much that could be done for hemophilia until the sixties — Roger kept on bleeding. That’s why he has such bad arthritis: because blood collects in the joints and ruins them. And that’s why he labors under the judgment of his bulk and finds it so deeply unfair when people call him fat. Because he can’t move. And that’s why he found a way to fight so many of his life-and-death battles through the television screen: It was his way of fighting the kids he saw playing outside through the window.
The article notes how Ailes, because he is the perennial victim, sees no irony or hypocrisy in holding others to standards that he himself, and his staff, do not. Pointing out their hypocrisy does nothing, as they feel the hypocrisy is justified (and therefore isn’t hypocrisy).
To see a blatant and recent example of this modus operandi (merely the latest in a long, long line), here’s the summary with links to how it went down….
splice42 6 points 3 hours ago[-]
So, then, the argument goes kind of like this:
Steve Cohen: Republicans use nazi tactics to mislead the populace
Megyn Kelly: O NO U DIDN’T, STOP THAT, U EVIL
Richard Socarides: Fox news commonly uses inflamed rhetoric such as comparing the other side to Nazis.
Megyn Kelly: NO WAI, WE DON’T
Jon Stewart: Are you stupid? Here is a series of clips showing various commentators comparing liberals to nazis. You do use inflammatory rhetoric all the time, and criticizing Cohen for doing that same thing is hypocritical.
O’Reilly: OH YEAH? Well, I was completely justified. Besides, look at that blog comment on the Huffington Post, it didn’t get removed.What a [fracking] bunch of morons. If the other side does it, it’s evil, if we do it, it’s justified, and besides, random people that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand also have hateful opinions, they aren’t censored, so we’re completely in the right here. So the left is evil and inflammatory when they use this language and they should be muzzled, but the right is completely justified because joe everybody can say something stupid and doesn’t get censored.
SRSLY.
Oh, and if you missed it from the Megyn Kelly lie expose link, here’s Ailes doing the same thing his employees do…being a huge douchebag hypocrite.
“A guy who gets fired and humiliated in the press [for being a poor journalist -ed] can lose a lot of confidence,” Ailes says. Calling [Juan] Williams “a pure liberal,” Ailes says he wanted to compensate the pundit for his losses because he was “mad” and “I didn’t want him to have to call his wife and say we lost money.”
Then he turned his sights on NPR executives.
“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”
While Ailes later apologized…to the ADL…which they somehow accepted….he has never apologized to the kids outside he hates so much for having fun while his “stuff” keeps him inside, weak and pitiful….err, I mean he never apologized to the Nazi’s at NPR, yea, that’s what he meant.
Robot Pirate Ninja 