Right Wing Messaging Works Well Because... Well, They Own The Media

Yesterday Rolling Stone published a spectacular feature by Tim Dickinson, How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory. "Ailes runs the most profitable-- and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra," he writes. "Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year-- nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring the Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news-gathering operation-- Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN-- Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent... Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.” Like right-wing media moguls before him, he sells fear-- anger, bombast, a virulent paranoid streak, unending appeals to white resentment... And Americans have been buying it.

One of the primary components of right-wing dominance in American politics is their almost total control of the mass media-- even including the irony of the absurd phrase "the liberal media." In fact, the media is completely corporate and overwhelmingly right-wing. Although many people trace that back the deregulatory catastrophe of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (gutting the Communications Act of 1934 and empowering Australian fascist Rupert Murdoch), this has been a major problem for progressives since American oligarchs and fascists made a conscious decision to buy up the media after the success of the muckrakers. As Glen Yeadon points out in The Nazi Hydra in America, American corporate leaders-- a fabulously wealthy elite commonly knows as the robber barons whose practices were universally detested by the public and subject to unwanted scrutiny and regulation by reform-minded government-- saw themselves as the victims of a political atmosphere created by the muckrakers. "Having experienced first hand the power of the press," writes Yeadon, "corporate America employed the media in a full scale assault to regain its stature. It used the three most successful propaganda method ever devised: patriotism, religion and anti-communism." But first it had to get control of the media. On Feb. 9, 1917 Texas Democrat, Rep. Oscar Callaway, inserted a statement into the Congressional Record that unmasks the machinations of the robber barons' play for control of the media:

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.

“These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

Revealing? Now let's see if career-long corporate shill Bill Clinton can do for Paul Ryan something like what he did for Rupert Murdoch-- and do America as much damage as he did with NAFTA and the Telecommunications Act. Bill Clinton? What's he got to do with anything? Watch: