Who picks the president?
by digby
I meant to write about this sooner after reading the NY Mag article, but time flies. We all know that Roger Ailes fashions himself a GOP kingmaker, but can you imagine the the outcry by the RWNM and all media critics if the head of a cable news network called a Democratic Governor or an active military man and begged him to run for President? NY Mag:
A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he’d invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run. Ailes had also hoped that David Petraeus would run for president, but Petraeus too has decided to sit this election out, choosing to stay on the counterterrorism front lines as the head of Barack Obama’s CIA.
If the head of any other news network tried to shape a single political party’s presidential primaries, they would rightly be decried for the unequivocal bias it revealed — not to mention the breathtaking absence of ethics.
When the White House did the unthinkable and questioned the integrity of Fox News, the Villagers all circled the wagons and declared such discussion off limits. And so it is. But it doesn’t change the fact that Fox is a corrupt adjunct of the Republican Party and nothing proves it more than the fact that the head of the network is recruiting people for the presidential nomination of the GOP, even going so far as to provide most contenders with a handsome sinecure.
He has a little problem at the moment. They are all nuts and he knows it. I think the silver lining in all this is that perhaps the Republican Party may recognize that putting a media genius in charge might not always work out the way you think it will. Fox brewed the television friendly tea and now the Presidential candidates are drowning in it.
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