Anybody and his dog can tell you most of Fox News is completely in the bag for Trump- can't think of one single on-air personality there I would say is a Cruz supporter, probably not even Megyn Kelly (strikes me as more of a
Paul-Ryan-at-the-Convention type)...
Soooo, with Cruz on the rise -and Trump slipping- it's obvious that Roger Ailes and his Fox News team are the most intellectually isolated from the conservative GOP base (and even a majority of the party) they've ever been- almost entirely detached from what most people I know are thinking.
In this bizarre, Orwellian campaign, only people like Mark Levin and Charlie Sykes still speak the truth while Fox has inhabited some parallel universe as imagined by Trump... and man, does it get tiresome.
Many have likely concluded that Fox saw Trump as inevitable after his cute little spat with Kelly faded away and he started to win some primaries, so they're simply promoting him to obtain access later- a scenario possibly brought about by an informal proposal from Team Trump.
But it's always seemed to me that Breitbart, Drudge, and Fox must be involved in something far more comprehensive regarding Trump... their enthusiasm for his campaign goes beyond your average garden-variety cheerleading: he received massive -uncritical- exposure right from the start... and today these 'conservative' media pillars display pro-Trump bias that would make a 1980s Pravda editor blush.
Their worst crime in my mind is not challenging Trump on his many obvious lies and half-truths, particularly in regard to his unhinged attacks on Ted Cruz and his family. And it's not just tone, but quantity- the free airtime Trump's received from Fox News exceeds $30M to date.
So what gives? Money? Cabinet positions? Threats?
If you think the worst with Trump re. methods/motivations, you'll find yourself consistently arriving somewhere very near the truth:
...now there is a new explanation for why the self-described 'most powerful name in news' got rolled and began doling out huge portions of their valuable airtime to what otherwise might be considered a joke candidate.
Gabriel Sherman, the National Affairs Editor for New York Magazine and the author of a biography of Fox CEO Roger Ailes (The Loudest Voice in the Room), just published a fascinating and in-depth story about the composition of Trump’s campaign team. But it also includes an account of how Fox Executive VP Brian Lewis got fired under mysterious circumstances (-details here-).
In the course of telling this story, Sherman revealed this startling bombshell:
'It was also thanks to some information he had gathered that Trump was able to do something that no other Republican has done before: take on Fox News. An odd bit of coincidence had given him a card to play against Fox founder Roger Ailes. In 2014, I published a biography of Ailes, which upset the famously paranoid executive.
Several months before it landed in stores, Ailes fired his longtime PR adviser Brian Lewis, accusing him of being a source. During Lewis’s severance negotiations, Lewis hired Judd Burstein, a powerhouse litigator, and claimed he had ‘bombs’ that would destroy Ailes and Fox News. That’s when Trump got involved.
'When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me,' Trump said. Burstein, it turned out, had worked for Trump briefly in the ’90s, and Ailes asked Trump to mediate. Trump ran the negotiations out of his office at Trump Tower. ‘Roger had lawyers, very expensive lawyers, and they couldn’t do anything. I solved the problem.’ Fox paid Lewis millions to go away quietly, and Trump, I’m told, learned everything Lewis had planned to leak. If Ailes ever truly went to war against Trump, Trump would have the arsenal to launch a retaliatory strike.'
Which he did it seems -backing Megyn Kelly right off him- and ever since Donald Trump has been their warm, cuddly buddy over there.
Trump continues to treat the network with contempt, calling them 'losers' and 'boring', etc, or Megyn Kelly 'a bimbo' because he knows he owns them... thus, even more difficult than usual mustering respect for anybody.
His only positive contribution to Fox News has been the marginalization of Karl Rove in the wake of Jeb Bush's $100M flop- Trump's influence over the network is now more powerful than the Bush machine, but it's hard to call it an improvement.
Yet who cares what comes out on Roger Ailes- he's seemingly sold us all out to a reckless would-be tyrant to somehow protect himself personally, hard to feel sorry for him if this is all true.
Alas, when The Donald goes down to defeat all these sellouts are finished, conservatives will be looking elsewhere for their news- Breitbart, Drudge, Team Fox, Coulter, Ingraham, Savage, Sarah Palin, et. a. are all going over the cliff with Trump.
But Trump couldn't possibly have dirt on all these people, so if he didn't
pay them off perhaps there's just a whole lot of bad judgement out there-
and who needs to listen a proven fool, anyway.
