"As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox"

Roger Ailes with his wife, Elizabeth Tilson, on July 19 in New York City. Credit Drew Angerer/Getty Images (source)

by Gaius Publius

In case you're wondering about the date in the headline, November 9 is the first day following the next U.S. election.

Thanks to a heads-up by digby, I took time to read Gabriel Sherman's excellent New York Magazine piece, "The Revenge of Roger’s Angels: How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media," from start to finish in one sitting. I strongly recommend you do the same — it's an excellent example of investigative journalism as well as investigative writing. The piece is a page-turner, and it's very well written.

There's too much information in it to capture here, but near the end there's a section that discusses what Fox becomes post-Ailes, and I'd like to focus on that. If Sherman is right on both of his counts — about the changes at Fox, about the emergence of Trump TV — the media landscape will drastically change post-election.

Will that change be for the better? That's a consideration for another time.

Fox After Ailes

On what Fox is about to become, Sherman writes:

Ailes’s ouster has created a leadership vacuum at Fox News. Several staffers have described feeling like being part of a totalitarian regime whose dictator has just been toppled. “No one knows what to do. No one knows who to report to. It’s just mayhem,” said a Fox host. As details of the Paul, Weiss [a law firm] investigation have filtered through the offices, staffers are expressing a mixture of shock and disgust. The scope of Ailes’s alleged abuse far exceeds what employees could have imagined. “People are so devastated,” one senior executive said. Those I spoke with have also been unnerved by [senior executive VP Bill] Shine and [Fox general counsel Dianne] Brandi’s roles in covering up Ailes’s behavior.

Despite revelations of how Ailes’s management team enabled his harassment, Murdoch has so far rejected calls — including from [Murdoch's son] James, according to ­sources — to conduct a wholesale housecleaning. On August 12, Murdoch promoted Shine and another Ailes loyalist, Jack Abernethy, to become co-presidents of Fox News. He named Scott executive vice-president and kept Brandi and [PR department executive Irena] Briganti in their jobs. Fox News’s chief financial officer, Mark Kranz, is the only senior executive to have been pushed out (officially he retired), along with [Ailes’s longtime executive assistant Judy] Laterza and a handful of assistants, contributors, and consultants. “Of course, they are trying to isolate this to just a few bad actors,” a 21st Century Fox executive told me.

Many people I spoke with believe that the current management arrangement is just a stopgap until the election. “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” predicts one host. “After the election, the prime-time lineup could be eviscerated. O’Reilly’s been talking about retirement. Megyn could go to another network. And Hannity will go to Trump TV.” ...

Meanwhile, the Murdochs are looking for a permanent CEO to navigate these post-Ailes, Trump-roiled waters. According to sources, James’s preferred candidates include CBS president David Rhodes (though he is under contract with CBS through 2019); Jesse Angelo, the New York Post publisher and James’s Harvard roommate; and perhaps a television executive from London. Sources say [Murdoch's son] Lachlan, who politically is more conservative than James, wants to bring in an outsider. Rupert was seen giving Rebekah Brooks a tour of the Fox offices several months ago, creating speculation that she could be brought in to run Fox. Another contender is Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.

You may remember the name Rebekah Brooks from the U.K. phone-tapping scandal (emphasis added):

Brooks was a prominent figure in the News International phone hacking scandal, having been the editor of the News of the World when illegal phone hacking was carried out by the newspaper. Following a criminal trial in 2014 she was cleared of all charges by a jury at the Old Bailey, which accepted her defence of incompetence: that she had no knowledge of the illegal acts carried out by the newspaper she edited.^[8]

In September 2015, Brooks was confirmed as CEO of News UK, the renamed News International, re-establishing the working relationship with News Corp founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch.

O"Reilly, Hannity, Megyn Kelly and more, all could be gone from Fox News after the election. It will be interesting to watch Fox reinvent itself as the competitor to what may be a network to its right, Trump TV, a network perhaps run by the attack dog, Roger Ailes, who turned Fox into what it used to be.

Trump TV

Trump TV, if it emerges after the election, will throw a spanner into the workings of a once unified right-wing (and alt-right) messaging ecosystem:

The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside Fox. The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used [in order] to build a loyal audience at Fox News — especially race and class — and used them to stoke barely containable outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives. Where that outrage is channeled after the election — assuming, as polls now suggest, Trump doesn’t make it to the White House — is a big question for the Republican Party and for Fox News.

As right-wing as they are, both Trump and Murdoch care about the money that goes to the most-watched media outlets. They're about to become competitors for it:

Trump had a complicated relationship with Fox even when his good friend Ailes was in charge; without Ailes, it’s plausible that he will try to monetize the movement he has galvanized in competition with the network rather than in concert with it. Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart, the digital-media upstart that has by some measures already surpassed Fox News as the locus of conservative energy, to run his campaign suggests a new right-wing news network of some kind is a real possibility.

And notice this tidbit, a hint of the infighting to come:

One prominent media executive told me that if Trump loses, Fox will need to try to damage him in the eyes of its viewers by blaming him for the defeat.

A battle for the eyes of the "deplorables" (an unfortunate, though interesting word) between Fox News and Trump TV — as well as for eyes and minds of the non-deplorable segment of the Trump-supporting world — should be fascinating to watch. One hopes they split the pie as they knife-fight to own it. I'd rather see an electorally divided "deplorables" than to see that group united, no matter how weakened their numbers.

As to the non-deplorable portion of Trump supporters — those suffering from the economic ravages of both pro-wealth Democratic rule and pro-wealth Republican rule — perhaps a newly populist Democratic Party can attract them for a change, instead of drive them away. Until a bad deed is done, one can hope for a good result.

Again, if you can spare the time, do read the whole thing. It's fascinating, incredibly lurid, and very well documented. If sexual office politics is your cup of tea, you'll drown in it. Fox News was a pit of predatory males, office women retained and passed around for sex, and mid-to-upper-level executives (of both sexes) who acted as procurers — "talent scouts" — to feed one toxic man's toxic need, along with the needs of those around him. Some of those needs were simply to survive in that kind of environment.

And Ailes? He's still at it, reportedly advising Trump as we speak. Lord help us.

GP
 

"We wanted people to learn that [domestic violence] is not just a woman's issue" (Ali Torre)

Last Thursday and Friday on MetroFocus (the nightly news-features show produced by the three Metro New York public TV entities, NYC's WNET13, Long Ialand's WLIW21, and NJN, the New Jersey Network), Billy Crystal talked to Joe and Ali Torre about the Torres' Safe At Home Foundation. Watch Part 1 of the interview here, and Part 2 here.

"What we wanted people to learn about the issue [domestic violence] is that it's not just a woman's issue, that for every woman that goes into a shelter there are two to three children that go with her."

-- Ali Torre, in the interview with Billy Crystal

"When I was growing up, I never shared this with anybody. When I used to go to my friend's house, waiting for my dad to go to work, I just went there. I didn't say I didn't want to go home 'cause my dad was there. So when we started our Safe At Home Foundation, friends who were very close to me had no clue, because I just was embarrassed, what was going on in my home, and I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood that had this going on."

-- Joe Torre, in the interview

by Ken

I've told this story before, but I'm going to tell it again. One day during my time at Howie's and my alma mater, James Madison High School in Brooklyn, a portion of the student body found ourselves in the auditorium where two guests came onstage. The younger guy was readily recognizable to most Brooklynites, because Joe Torre, a Brooklyn boy, had in just a few years with the Milwaukee Braves established himself as a baseball star.

I wasn't a Brooklyn kid, though. I was a transplant (most recently) from Milwaukee, so I recognized the older guy as Joe's brother Frank, whom I'd seen play a major role in the Braves' winning two NL pennants and a World Series. In fact, I remembered the spring when Frank showed up at camp with his chubby little brother, a catcher, in tow. It may have been mostly as a favor to Frank, but the Braves wound up signing Joe to a contract, which turned out to be one heckuva smart move. Because he turned out to be a great player (and later a great manager).

In fact, that day at the James Madison HS assembly, Joe was a ringer. Frank Torre was indeed a Madison alum, but Joe as the coddled baby among five siblings (in the interview, he reminds us that he's eight and a half years younger than his next-youngest sibling), went to private school -- Catholic high school, of course.

Maybe you had to be there at the time to appreciate how good a player Joe Torre was, playing with a quiet competence and day-in, day-out consistency that fit perfectly with the "image" of unflappable self-confidence -- as Billy Crystal notes in the MetroFocus interview with Joe and his wife, Ali -- that Joe seemed to exude throughout his baseball career. But as Joe reveals in the interview, most of his life he was anything but confident. He reminds us that his freshman year in high school he didn't even go out for the baseball team, feeling he wasn't good enough. He was almost pathologically shy, always reluctant to speak, often feeling ashamed.

One thing he was most unlikely to do was speak in front of a group. Which makes what happened one day in November or December of 1995 (when he was 55), at a four-day seminar in Cincinnati, Ali's hometown, where she and Joe had moved after he was fired as manager of the Saint Louis Cardinals. (Interestingly, he doesn't mention until later that he had in fact just been named manager of the New York Yankees.) Ali had persuaded him to attend this Life Success seminar, where they were assigned to separate groups.

About day two or three, after this one speaker, saying a lot of things that hit home with me, I wind up standing up, in front of the whole group, and I was crying, because I realized, instead of being born with the low self-esteem, instead of being born with the nervousness that I thought . . . I was sort of embarrassed about it. I didn't want to share with anybody that I had these insecurities. I realized that what was going on in my home, where my dad was abusing my mom -- physically abusing her, and of course emotionally abusing her -- that that was what caused it.

Joe doesn't remember what exactly he said, and in the interview he forgets that Ali can't tell us because she wasn't there. But she remembers the effect it had on him, and remembers in particular that that night when they got home, he called one of his sisters and asked, "Did Dad hit Mom?"

-- from the Safe At Home Foundation website

Since that day obviously Joe has talked about his family history a lot, and now everybody knows the story: how as the baby among the five Torre children (including brothers Frank and Rocco and sisters Rae and Marguerite), he was protected by his older siblings, and especially by his sisters, from the violence of their home, and how eventually it was Frank and Rocco who confronted their father, a police detective well known and admired in their Marine Park neighborhood, and forced him to move out of the house.

But I had no idea until now that Joe, traumatized though he was by the atmosphere created in his house by his father's raging temper (if Joe Sr. didn't like what his wife served him for lunch, young Joe could hear the plate crashing against the wall), never knew his father was physically abusing his mother. (He does tell a fairly hair-raising story, though, about an incident he did witness, when Rae took knife in hand to protect their mother, Margaret, from their father on one of his rampages. Dad proceeded to fetch his detective's revolver, whereupon the youngest Torre walked over and took the knife out of his sister's hand.) In good part Joe's obliviousness resulted from his brothers' and sisters' efforts to protect him, which had its ironic side. With all the whispering young Joe witnessed going on among all the rest of his family, he assumed that what was going on must be his fault.

And he kept it all to himself. Until that fateful day in Cincinnati, he didn't even talk about what went on in his home to Ali, who knew only that the home environment was seriously troubled and his parents divorced when Joe was 11 or 12.

When I was growing up, I never shared this with anybody. When I used to go to my friend's house, waiting for my dad to go to work, I just went there. I didn't say I didn't want to go home 'cause my dad was there. So when we started our Safe At Home Foundation, friends who were very close to me had no clue, because i just was embarrassed, what was going on in my home, and I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood that had this going on.

Which is why a crucial part of the work of Joe and Ali's Safe At Home Foundation is concerned with education, including programs in schools where, as Joe says, they try to communicate two messages: "You're not the only one," and "It's not your fault." Billly Crystal, who has attended a lot of those sessions, reports that he has often heard kids who've gotten the messages say they're not afraid to go home anymore.

After watching the first part of Joe and Ali's interview with Billy Crystal, I knew I wanted to get something about it on the record. My original idea was to do a post combining that and the latest developments in the scandal of the hellishly abusive environment created by Roger Ailes at Fox Noise, since that too was widely thought of as a "woman's issue" when it was just Gretchen Carlson filing suit against the giant rat bastard, at least until other women at the network, past and present, began telling their stories. Even now, the fall of Roger Ailes is surely regarded as a lesser side story to the story of what he built at Fox Noise -- an engine for turning the country into the hell of his diseased mind.

Eventually the scope of the Fox Noise horror crowded the other story out, and took precedence news-wise. But still in my mind the two stories, of sexual harassment at Fox Noise and of epidemic domestic violence, are still related. The crowning irony is that they take place in a society that pretends to be built on "family values." The eerie reality is that quite possibly our society truly is built on the "family values" we actually practice. Can this possibly not have a major role in defining who and what we are?



By all accounts Joe's doting sisters Rae and Marguerite played a major role in the upbringing of their baby brother. As seen above, they became household figures to Yankee fans during his time as manager, and both were in Cooperstown when he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame as a manager in 2014; Rae died the following February, at 89.

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Anyone Know How Strong Roger Ailes' Non-Compete Agreement Is?

Recently a non-profit told me they would be honoring two of their donors with a ceremony and a dinner and that one was me. What an honor! The other honoree, however, presented a conundrum. The co-honoree has been ultra-generous to the charity but he had just given $13 million in support to Ted Cruz's campaign. It was far right poker fanatic Robert Mercer. I looked him up and didn't want to be in the same room with him, let alone at the same dinner table. Fortunately, someone at the charity looked us both up, put 1+1 together and fconcluded it would be a bad match and decided to have two separate dinners.

Since then the modern day robber baron and crooked hedge fund manager has shifted his efforts from Cruz to Mr. Trumpanzee and just spent $500,000 helping John Faso against campaign finance reformer Zephyr Teachout. Steve Bannon is on his payroll and he pretty much underwrites the deranged Bretibart hate site. And now the NYC/DC axis is buzzing with rumors that the Trumpanzee campaign, which Mercer is helping to finance, is not really about winning the presidency but about starting a fascist-- they call it "alt-right" these days-- media empire combining the... talents of Mr. Trumpanzee, Roger Ailes, Mercer, and Steve Bannon. Trump's declaration of war against the media (the "crooked media" as he puts it) is part of the set up.

People have been speculating all week that Trump wants to launch a cable news channel next year or some kind of media empire. Sillier things have happened-- like a successful launch of a campaign to capture the Republican presidential nomination. Eric Levitz, writing yesterday for New York Magazine, pointed out that Bannon has been urging Trump-- who needed no urging-- to ignore the hated Republican Party establishment and "to run more fully as an outsider and an unabashed nationalist."

Pundits of all political persuasions found this strategy baffling. The Post’s Greg Sargent derided it as “entirely delusional.” And, on the surface, that sounds about right. It looks like yet another example of Trump refusing to understand that the dynamics of a GOP primary differ from those of a general election.

But, in this case, Trump’s skeptics may be giving the mogul too little credit. Because if Trump isn’t trying to win the election, his new strategy might be the most rational decision of his entire campaign.

And why should Trump be trying to win, at this point? New polls from Quinnipiac-- a firm whose results tend to lean Republican-- show Trump losing by double-digits in Colorado and Virginia. Earlier this week, a Monmouth poll showed Trump down by nine in Florida. The New York Times currently gives Trump a 13 percent chance of winning November’s election.

Let’s stipulate, for the moment, that Trump launched his presidential campaign with the sincere intention of winning the White House. Put yourself in his shoes.

You can either spend the next two-and-a-half months doing everything the political professionals say that you should: Read the boring speeches off the teleprompters. Go speak to skeptical audiences in the African-American community who will almost certainly boo you. Spend your nights in hotels in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa. Recite carefully vetted talking points in interviews. And tell yourself that all these sacrifices are worth it, because they will marginally reduce your probability of losing on November 8.

Or, you can accept the reality that there is (almost certainly) nothing you can do, at this point, to change the outcome on Election Day. Your path to 270 electoral votes was slim to begin with. Even if Clinton loses all of the states that are currently “too close to call” she will still win the presidency. And she’s winning in nearly all of those swing states, anyway. And she has better ground game in all of them.

If your candidacy is dead, then everything is permitted. Your favorite part of running for president has always been riling up crowds of people who love you-- and/or being able to share every damn thought that comes into your head on national television, anytime you please. Why not design a campaign “strategy” that allows you to do those things, without being frowned at by your advisers?

This seems like an easy choice. And when you consider the possibility that Trump never intended to be president, it becomes even easier.

On Tuesday, left-wing documentarian Michael Moore wrote that he “knows for a fact” that Trump never wanted to occupy the Oval Office. Instead, Trump launched his presidential bid as a means of increasing the value of his brand, thereby extracting more favorable terms in his negotiations with NBC over the next season of The Apprentice. But the ploy backfired-- while, paradoxically, working too well.

Trump’s decision to deride Mexicans as “rapists” and “drug dealers” in his launch speech rendered him toxic to the network-- but beloved by GOP primary voters. Soon, Trump had lost a show but gained an unprecedented level of attention and fame. This was tremendous. But also horrible, because it put him in the impossible position of desperately wanting to be the ultimate “winner,” while also desperately not wanting to actually be president.

Elements of Moore’s narrative are backed up by the confession of a former Trump campaign strategist, published by xoJane in March. The story also seems consistent with Vanity Fair’s report that the candidate has been mulling the creation of his own conservative cable-news empire, once the campaign is through. The magazine wrote that “the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the ‘audience’ currently supporting him,” and had “discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate.”

So, slip those Trump shoes back on, one last time. Imagine that you launched a presidential campaign to further your showbiz career. After 14 months as a candidate, you’ve realized that you can’t win in November but you can attract an audience of conservative-news consumers who are looking for an alternative to Fox News. How would you spend the last weeks of your campaign?

Sexual predator

Perhaps, you would prioritize keeping your prospective audience entertained, above all else. And to do that, you’d make someone with experience in far-right infotainment the chief executive of your campaign. Plus, you might want to seek out an adviser who really knows the cable-news business. Someone like, I don’t know, Roger Ailes?

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

These people-- Bannon, Mercer, Ailes, particularly, even Mr. Trumpanzee-- know how to read polls and interpret focus groups and they are absolutely onto post-election planning now. I hope Team Hillary is strategizing about how to deal with them because there's more than a little bit of a chance that the destruction of the United States of America is the ultimate goal-- starting with her presidency.

Minutes ago Conor Friedersdorf published a piece in The Atlantic speculating that when the Trumpanzee loses his consolation prize may be a whole new right wing media juggernaut, "that challenges Fox News for supremacy on the right across all platforms." Even discounting Mercer, he wrote that "If today’s polls hold through election day, Trump and associates will be proved failures at electoral politics. But even if that proves so, I wouldn’t bet against a right-wing media behemoth that brought together Trump, Roger Ailes, Stephen Bannon, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and Sarah Palin" and reminds us that O'Reilly, Hannity and Greta Van Susteren could all legally follow Ailes if they want to.

A Trump campaign expecting to lose and then launch an effort of that sort would have every incentive to hoard campaign donations to pay back debt incurred by Trump himself; to be maximally inflammatory, polarizing the electorate while further cultivating a core of true believers; to aggressively blame Fox News, National Review, Glenn Beck, and all other potential competitors in order to alienate them from their audiences; even to sabotage the GOP down ballot, depending on just how cynical the folks running things are. After all, what could be better for business, if you’re a new media conglomerate to the right of Fox News, than a Hillary Clinton presidency supercharged by a Democratic House and Senate?

Nor would the nightmare for the right end on election day. Even after a huge Trump loss, a Trump News Network could help a destructive faction that might have faded in other circumstances to keep driving the Republican Party toward white identity politics, egregious misinformation, ideological incoherence, destructive infighting, and attacks on minority groups, with all of the attendant costs.

Roger Ailes, Along With All His Chins And Jowls, Is Being Fired From Fox, Possibly Friday

Matthew Garrahan and Anna Nicolaou reported at the Financial Times that serial sex predator Roger Ailes is getting the heave-ho, courtesy of Rupert Murdoch & Sons, probably after the Republican convention. Two Fox males and a woman who looks like a man, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren-- 3 of the only on air people who were not forced to perform oral sex on Ailes-- have clauses in their contracts that would allow them to leave if Ailes does. "This means," warned the Financial Times, "a core team of on-air talent could follow Mr Ailes out of the door."

Ailes has told associates he is furious at his treatment by the Murdochs. 21st Century Fox opened an internal investigation into him on July 6, after former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit alleging that he fired her after 11 years for refusing to have a sexual relationship with him.

In another blow to Mr Ailes, New York magazine reported on Tuesday that Megyn Kelly, arguably Fox News’ biggest star, told lawyers leading the internal investigation that Mr Ailes had sexually harassed her a decade ago.

Meanwhile, Ryan Grim ran into GOP haridan Ann Coulter on a plane and she told him Ailes is "definitely out." She's never been employed by Fox but she's part of the family and had heard from others about Ailes tendency to force women to have sex with him by threatening their careers.

Fundamentalist type conservatives-- whether in backward countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia or backward regions here in the Republican parts of the U.S-- have such weird, twisted perspectives on women. They really do still see women as chattel-- which accounts for both Roger Ailes behavior and for Mike Pence's and much of the Republican Party's throwback politics. It's dangerous to the health of society and the well being of the United States.



Gabriel Sherman, the Ailes biographer who first broke the story about him preying on Fox employees was up at New York this morning with a follow-up about how Megan Kelly had been harassed by the repulsive Ailes as well. Kelly encouraged other Fox women who had been pressured for sex by Ailes to speak up. Aides has been busy trying to plant stories with the press that there will be a mass exodus of Fox personnel if he's fired. Message from the Murdoch's to accept their severance offer "or face further public humiliation" is embodied in today's front cover... and this rather blunt tweet:

UPDATE: Ailes Escorted To The Door

As had become obvious, Roger Ailes was forced out at Fox News today. He gets a $60 million golden parachute.

Ever Wonder Why Fox News Always Poo-Poos The Republican War On Women?

How many of those women who work at Fox News actually have blown him?

I was driving. My boss was in the front seat and an old friend of mine-- a young old friend of mine-- was in the back seat. He was applying for a job and my boss was taking us out to lunch (on his company credit card). He said something shocking with the clear implication that my friend could only get the job if he would have sex with him. My friend and I tried to laugh it off. The boss turned around and lurched at him-- going in for a crotch grab. My friend was agile and fast and escaped the lunge. He then rolled up a copy of BAM magazine and when my boss lurched at him again he swatted him across the snout, hard enough to make him stop. He then told my friend he would never work at the company.

A few months later, another friend of mine then hired him at another division of the same company. (He was also gay and persisted in trying to molest my friend, who always deflected his advances, and never made his advancement in the company dependent on acquiescing. It was probably annoying but not career-threatening.) Eventually my friend excelled and went on to great accomplishments-- as well as fame and fortune. My boss continued trying, sometimes successfully, more often not, in trying to use his position to force young men into having sex with him. He's writing an autobiography now but he's leaving those episodes out.

My first reaction to reading about ex-Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson's suit against her lecherous one-time boss, Roger Ailes, was to think that men would tend to dismiss this kind of thing with a chuckle and probably never "get" the true horror of this kind of behavior. Ailes is an extremely ugly-- to the point of deformity-- man. His fat face is dripping blubbery chins and jowls. I tweeted out his photo and asked men to consider how they would react if a man threatened their livelihood and career by making it conditional on allowing him to mount them and penetrate them. The tweet didn't go viral.

Saturday, Ailes' biographer Gabriel Sherman, writing for New York reported that Ailes and his chins didn't just use his power to try to force himself on Carlsen. There have been many women he's imposed on in this way and his behavior wasn't just repulsive, but compulsive.

In recent days, more than a dozen women have contacted Carlson’s New Jersey-based attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, and made detailed allegations of sexual harassment by Ailes over a 25-year period dating back to the 1960s when he was a producer on The Mike Douglas Show. “These are women who have never told these stories until now,” Smith told me. “Some are in lot of pain.” Taken together, these stories portray Ailes as a boss who spoke openly of expecting women to perform sexual favors in exchange for job opportunities. “He said that’s how all these men in media and politics work-- everyone’s got their friend,” recalled Kellie Boyle, who says Ailes propositioned her in 1989, shortly after he helped George H.W. Bush become president, serving as his chief media strategist.

Six of the women agreed to speak with New York publicly for the first time. Two spoke on the record; the others requested anonymity for reasons that include shame and fear of retribution. “I didn’t tell my husband, it was so mortifying,” said Marsha Callahan, a former model who says Ailes harassed her in the late ‘60s, shortly before he became Richard Nixon’s media adviser.

Ailes is clearly trying to keep these stories out of the press and the courts. Late on Friday, his lawyers filed a motion in federal court in New Jersey seeking to move Carlson’s lawsuit to arbitration, which would prevent witnesses from being called in court. “Plaintiff’s ploy of filing in Superior Court to justify her shameless publicity campaign against Roger Ailes should not be countenanced,” Ailes’s lawyers argued. Carlson's lawyers responded in a statement: "Roger Ailes is trying to force this case into a secret arbitration proceeding...Gretchen never agreed to arbitrate anything with Mr. Ailes.”

Ailes told one RNC employee-- a married woman whose husband Ailes knew-- that if she wanted to succeed at the RNC she would have to suck seed-- first his and then other men's. Fellas, before you laugh, try to picture Ailes putting his shriveled old cock in your mouth and dribbling his slime into you. Or you could just give up your career. "Well you might have to give a blowjob every once in a while," he told her and when she punted and played for time to get away from him he shot back, "No, if you don’t do it now, you know that means you won’t." She refused and Ailes called the RNC guy she was seeing about a promotion and killed the meeting.

Back in New Jersey I got a call from Roger Ailes. He said, ‘How’d your meeting go?’ I said, ‘Actually he wasn’t available and I’m hoping to hear back from him.’ He said, ‘Ah, well, I’m sure you will. Have you changed your mind yet?’ I said, ‘I’ll have to pass, Roger. I’m married and really committed to my husband. No offense.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll be in touch.’ And that was that. A couple weeks later, I called a friend who was very high up in the RNC and I asked him what happened. He said, ‘Word went out you weren’t to be hired.’

Do you consider that part of the Republican War Against Women? Half a dozen other women recounted their Ailes stories for Sherman for his article. I was, literally, too sickened to read them. Those women were our mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, friends. Gretchen Carlson is incredibly brave to bring it up in public, knowing full well that scumbags like Ailes and Murdoch and their Republican and media allies will do all they can to destroy her now.

It's Tuesday-- And Trump Is Still Kicking The GOP Establishment's Ass

As we explained yesterday, Murdoch demanded Ailes kill off Trump's candidacy. So far, it doesn't seem to have worked. Even Trump's ugly sexism and misogyny haven't taken much of a toll-- at least not among Republicans, who are, after all, Republicans.

Donald Trump continued to defy the laws of political gravity on Monday as a Reuters/Ipsos poll found the real estate mogul holding onto a wide lead among Republicans in the U.S. presidential race despite an acerbic debate and a feud with a female television anchor that have bolstered charges of sexism.

Trump led the party's 17-strong 2016 presidential field with the backing of 24 percent of Republican voters, unchanged from before Thursday's televised debate.

His closest rival, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, trails at 12 percent, down from 17 percent before the debate. No other candidate earned more than 8 percent in the online poll, conducted between the end of the debate and Sunday.

The reality television star has been under intense criticism for caustic comments about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly during and after the debate, and was disinvited from a weekend gathering of conservative activists in Georgia after he said Kelly, who helped moderate the debate, had "blood coming out of her wherever."

...the drama has done little so far to dent Trump's appeal among less affluent, conservative-leaning voters who say his brash style is needed to shake up an overly cautious political system and that his vast wealth would help him resist corrupting influences.

"They want someone who's an outsider, who can upset the applecart," said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party. "They're willing to deal with a less-than-perfect candidate if they believe it will actually change things in Washington."

There have been 4 polls since the debate and Trump still leads the Republican field in all of them. What a pathetically weak field of candidates they have! There isn't a single plausible leader in the whole lot-- not even in the eyes of Republicans! He's beating the Establishment's front-runner, Jeb!, by around 20 points. His favorability among Republican voters has actually increased-- substantially-- although this may have something to do with how weak the field is.

PPP's survey shows Trump leading second-place contenders Ben Carson and Koch Brothers puppet Scott Walker by 7 points and leading Jeb! 19-11%.

The biggest loser in the poll is Rand Paul. He now has a negative favorability rating at 31/45. That gives him the worst numbers of anyone in the field, outdistancing even Chris Christie on the unpopularity front. Paul's 3% standing represents a drop all the way down from 10% in April. Paul has been foundering anyway, and his campaign's ties to the Kent Sorenson mess are probably making things particularly bad for him in Iowa.

Besides Paul, the candidate worst off in this poll is Christie. He's never been strong in Iowa-- he was at 5% in April-- but now he's polling in asterisk territory at 1%. Christie's overall image has actually improved-- he's still unpopular, with a 34/44 favorability rating, but that's better than the 28/50 in April-- but he may be losing voters who value his tough talk style to Trump.

Scott Walker (from 23% to 12%), Marco Rubio (from 13% to 6%), and Mike Huckabee (from 10% to 6%) all saw sizable drops in their support over the last four months. The good news for them though is that they're still among the most popular candidates in the state, right behind Carson. Rubio's favorability is 66/15, Huckabee's is 64/20, and Walker's is 63/17. Being so well liked positions all of them well to potentially benefit as other candidates falter further down the line. Walker is tied with Fiorina as the most frequent 2nd choice of voters at 11% and Rubio is in double digits on that front as well at 10%. Jeb Bush (12% in April, 11% now) and Ted Cruz (8% in April, 9% now) are both holding pretty steady. And despite his support for the nomination being flat, voters are warming up to Bush some- his 45/32 favorability is an improvement from 38/37 in the spring.

Even worse news for the Republican Party Establishment came from Morning Consult, which found Trump leading the Republican field with 32%, a 7-point gain in the last week, the week the GOP thought they could kill off his candidacy. They tried; they failed. Instead, the biggest Trump critics, Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham and Chris Christie, are seeing their candidacies imploding. The Kochs and Adelsons intend to foist Scott Walker and Marco Rubio off as the GOP ticket for 2016, but those two worthless candidates command a mere 6% each.

The share of Republican primary voters who say they view Trump favorably increased since the last tracking poll, to 62 percent from 57 percent. But the number of registered voters who say they see Trump unfavorably remains high-- 52 percent of all voters say they see him in a negative light. That makes Trump both the most popular candidate within the Republican field and the least popular candidate Republicans could nominate for next year’s general election.

Thursday’s debate, viewed by a record-setting 24 million people, did not provide a boost for any other leading Republican contender. Carson, Walker, Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) all clocked in at about the same level of support as they did the previous week, while Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) saw his support drop from 7 percent to 4 percent.

An earlier debate, held for candidates who didn’t make the list of top 10 contenders that included Trump, gave a boost to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. After her performance in the so-called Happy Hour debate, Fiorina won support from 3 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, up from 1 percent the week before. The percentage of voters who said they have a favorable view of Fiorina-- 25 percent among all registered voters and 39 percent among self-identified Republicans-- spiked sharply as well.

Fox may actually have to back down from their Murdoch-mandated anti-Trump jihad. According to a New York Magazine "Daily Intelligencer" piece yesterday by Gabriel Sherman, Fox News is worried that its brain-dead viewers are on Trump's side in the dust-up!

This morning, Trump tweeted that Ailes called to assure him that Fox will cover him “fairly” going forward. According to two high-level Fox sources, Ailes's diplomacy was the result of increasing concern inside Fox News that Trump could damage the network. Immediately following Thursday's debate, Fox was deluged with pro-Trump emails. The chatter on Twitter was equally in Trump’s favor. “In the beginning, virtually 100-percent of the emails were against Megyn Kelly,” one Fox source, who was briefed on the situation told me. “Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.”

Things got worse for Ailes over the weekend. In a phone conversation, Trump told Sean Hannity that “he was never doing Fox again,” according to one person with knowledge of the call. The anti-Kelly emails, and threat of a boycott by Trump, seems to have pushed Ailes to diffuse the war. One Fox personality told me that Fox producers gave instructions to tell in-house talent not to bring up Trump’s controversial comments that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever" during the debate. According to one count, Fox only aired Trump’s comment once since Friday, while CNN mentioned it at least 50 times.

In recent days, Ailes got a glimpse of what a Trumpless Fox News would look like. On Sunday, Trump called in to the four other public affairs shows; this morning he gave interviews to Today and Morning Joe. Inside Fox, this was alarming. “This thing with Megyn got way ahead of Roger and bigger than he must have thought,” one Fox personality said. “Roger wants this to blow over,” another source added. “He’s upset that conservatives are mad at Fox.” Online, Ailes also took flack. Both The Drudge Report and Breitbart News carried pro-Trump headlines.

Tonight Sean Hannity will be hosting Trump on his show for a full hour.

Monday Morning: Is Trump Still The Frontrunner?

There really was only one reason Nielsen could report that the Fox News GOP debate was "the most watched primary debate in history, averaging a whopping 24 million viewers from 9 to just past 11 pm." Trump.

Yesterday Trump was on virtually every Sunday morning gabfest-- except Fox's (which was busy pushing well-spoken nitwit Carly Fiorina, who insisted California, rather than, say, Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country). This is significant because Fox had been inflating the Trump bubble for the sake of ratings and has given Trump by far the most airtime of any candidate-- 31 appearances, compared with just 7 for Jeb, for example.

And more than simple airtime, Fox News's hosts defended Trump when the rest of the media was piling onto his more noxious comments.

When Trump said Mexico was sending rapists and criminals into America, Fox News contributor Monica Crowley said Trump "is saying things that need to be said."

When Trump blasted Senator John McCain's war record, Fox News's Steve Doocy said, "if you listen to his comments in total...he's not critical of John McCain the war hero, he's critical of his Senate record." Harris Faulkner said "McCain is not admitting that he kind of started this whole thing."

Erik Bolling, a member of Fox News's 'The Five," said, "I like what Donald Trump is saying, I like what he's doing." On Fox and Friends, Trump was compared to St. Augustine and Mr. Smith from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And on his radio show, Sean Hannity, one of Fox's key primetime personalities, gave Trump the ultimate compliment. He compared him to Ronald Reagan.

And then Murdoch ordered Ailes to cut the crap and stop pushing Trump. When Trump stepped onto the debate stage he found his erstwhile allies were out to get him-- "committed," as Ezra Klein wrote, "to his destruction... Look at the debate from Trump's perspective. His onetime friends at Fox News crafted the questions to embarrass him and then, once he was off the air, cut to a focus group-- and who knows if that was a real focus group or actors who were coached on what to say-- who told the whole country that Trump had lost the debate."

Fox News is a strange beast. It is a conservative advocacy organization run by a longtime Republican operative. It is a profit-hungry cable network run by a talented media executive. And it is a news operation that employs some talented journalists who want to be taken seriously by their peers.

These missions conflict with each other. Fox News wants the Republican Party to win elections but it also wants American politics to be a ridiculous circus that fires up conservative voters. It employs hacks like Steve Doocy and Sean Hannity but also hosts people like Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly, Shepard Smith, and Chris Wallace who, while they might be conservative, pride themselves on actually being journalists.

And what makes all this harder is that Fox News is tremendously powerful. It is arguably more powerful in shaping the opinions of GOP voters than the official Republican Party apparatus. It's no accident that the first Republican debate was held on Fox News. Of course it was. The Republican Party needs Fox News more than Fox News needs the the Republican Party-- something the GOP learned when Fox devoted endless airtime to pumping the rise of the Tea Party.

As heterodox conservative commentator David Frum said, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox."

This is the dilemma that Trump now faces. He originally thought Fox worked for him. he was on all the time, he was helping them get higher ratings, and they seemed to love him. But then a few things happened.

...Fox News's incentives had switched. Early in the campaign, the way to get bigger ratings was to build Trump up. But now the whole country was tuning in, and what most people wanted to see was Trump torn down-- or at least the fight that would result if Fox News tried to tear Trump down. And that's what they got. It was extraordinary television, and it led Fox to the highest ratings for any cable news program ever broadcast. Fox figured out how to profit off Trump coming and going, and, better yet, they got to decide when Trump was coming and when Trump was going.

Now Trump and Fox News are at war. And, as Nate Silver writes, this is a war Trump probably can't win.

Until now, Trump has mostly been fighting with institutions that Republicans mistrust-- like the media, and the Republican establishment in Washington, DC. But 80 percent of Republicans trust Fox News. And Fox News is the most reliable source of cable airtime for Republican candidates trying to reach Republican voters.

Trump's feeling that he's been betrayed by Fox News is understandable, even if his reaction to it is gross and childish. But his declaration of war against a major Fox News personality is unwise, and may mark the beginning of the end of his campaign.

oops!

Yesterday, Trump said he's having fun and he's staying in the race for the GOP nomination. Friday, he had told NY Times reporters that he was irritated by the debate moderators’ questions about a third-party candidacy, saying he wanted to run as a Republican, but he reiterated his threat to mount one if he is unhappy with his treatment by party leaders. An independent candidacy would be complicated and costly, he said, but "if you’re rich, it’s doable."

Some Republicans were trying to determine just who was rallying to Mr. Trump’s side, and how damaging it would be if his supporters left the party’s fold.

“Trump isn’t and wasn’t going to get the conservative vote,” Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of the Union Leader newspaper in New Hampshire, said in an email. “Conservative Republicans are worried about their party, but it’s still their party. Trump isn’t philosophically a conservative, and that will come out.”

“Trump’s base is more the people who used to have season tickets to the Roman Colosseum,” Mr. McQuaid wrote. “Not sure that they vote in great numbers, but they like blood sport.”

But others on the right said the disaffected voters rallying to Mr. Trump represented a constituency that Republicans would be foolish to ignore.

“People have to get their minds wrapped around the fact that the seething fury at the leadership of the Republican Party is real, and it’s going to bubble over somehow with somebody, and right now it’s with Trump,” said the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, noting that there were “a lot of ticked-off people out there who are willing to throw both parties into the fire.”

...[Former Senator Judd] Gregg said that while RedState was wise to bar him from its event, the party would only “make him an even larger figure” by trying to keep him out of future debates. “He’d love that,” Mr. Gregg said. “He loves when institutional forces take him on. That’s part of his shtick.”

He added: “The campaign is serious, but his campaign isn’t. It’s entertainment. What’s the line of decency in the entertainment world? It’s pretty far out there.”

Some in the party have mused privately about using Mr. Trump’s refusal to rule out an independent bid as grounds to bar him from future debates, but there is deep concern that such a heavy-handed effort would only prod him into pursuing such a run.

It also appeared unlikely that any network could be persuaded to exclude him. As Mr. Trump crowed Friday in a telephone interview, “I’m a ratings machine.”

Robert Costa reported over the weekend:

Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee. Fearful that the billionaire’s inflammatory rhetoric has inflicted serious damage to the GOP brand, party leaders hope to pivot away from the Trump sideshow and toward a more serious discussion among a deep field of governors, senators and other candidates.

Partisans of Jeb (the Party's traditional Establishment) and of the Scott Walker/Marco Rubio ticket (the Kochs and Adelsons) have been panicky that Trump is crushing their candidates and making them appear weak and dull. They've been predicting Trump was finished every single time he said something outrageous.

“I have a lot of money, and I’m not getting out. I’m going to win,” Trump said. “You watch: When this campaign is over, I win. As good as I’m doing-- and I’m leading the polls-- it’s just the start.”

Trump added, “I want this to be serious, I really do.”

However, a consensus is forming in Republican circles that Trump’s eruption over Kelly and other Fox News anchors makes his campaign anything but serious.

“The fire still burns, but the fire is now contained,” said Alex Castellanos, a veteran GOP strategist. “He can’t grow. He has condemned himself to be a protest candidate, not a serious candidate for the Republican nomination. That means we now move forward to a more normal debate.”

...“If you start to see erosion of Trump’s numbers, it could become a tailspin quickly, and it could be hard to pull the plane out of the dive,” said Phil Musser, a GOP consultant and chairman of IMGE, a digital media agency. “There would be a major pile-on and likely a spectacular crash.”

Lindsay Graham, an ineffectual, closeted senator with a zero in the polls, though still beloved by the Beltway media, has been sparring with Trump, which has helped Trump and hurt Graham. Yesterday he said,

Donald Trump is an out of control car driving through a crowd of Republicans and somebody needs to get him out of the car. I just don’t see a pathway forward for us in 2016 to win the White House if we don’t decisively deal with this.

Matt Taibbi wonders if all these attacks on Trump will actually make him stronger. Will the orchestrated attacks backfire? The ambush was in plain sight and no other candidate was treated the way Trump was treated during the Fox debate.

That Fox and the other "contestants" onstage were ganging up on Trump was clear enough, but it hasn't stopped there. Trump is now also seeing a wave of punditry pieces flowing in from traditional conservative outlets slamming his campaign. The National Review's Jonah Goldberg wrote a long piece this month, "Trump fans, it's time for an intervention."

Stung by Trump's criticism of him as a guy who "couldn't buy a pair of pants," Goldberg blasted Trump as a grifter and a RINO who is easier to believe as a "stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary" than as a Republican nominee.

Meanwhile, Rich Lowry at the Review called the debate a "fabulously awful" night for Trump. He slobbered over the rest of the field. He said Bush "made no mistakes," Christie was "forceful," Carson was "winsome," Kasich "more of a presence than I would have thought," and Huckabee was "incapable of having a bad debate."

Meanwhile, Fox contributor Charles Krauthammer gleefully declared the debate to be the "end of Trump," saying that he looked "lost." He's been an ongoing critic of the Donald, along with other Republican stalwarts like George Will, who not long ago asked, "If Trump were a Democratic mole, how would his behavior be any different?"

...What the Goldbergs and the Wills and Krauthammers of the world probably don't get is that by singling Trump out for abuse, they're almost certainly boosting his campaign. First of all, while it might have looked like a damning image to see Trump alone onstage with his hand up and refusing to pledge not to run as an Independent, on another level it was a great Trump moment. As it has been all season, there was Trump, and everyone else. That scene just made the other nine guys onstage look like what they are, stooges beholden to their party and their donors, unable to think for themselves.

The main argument of all of Trump's conservative critics seems to be, "He's not a real Republican! He'll destroy the party establishment!" The people making these criticisms seem to assume that conservative voters will see this as a bad thing.

But there are plenty of Tea Party-type voters out there who hate the Republican Party establishment almost as much as they hate the Democrats. There are also plenty of right-wing voters who think George Will and Charles Krauthammer are smug media weasels only slightly less disgusting than the Rachel Maddows and Keith Olbermanns of the world. A know-it-all is a know-it-all.

Trump's followers are a gang of pissed-off nativists who are tired of being laughed at, belittled, dismissed, and told who to vote for. So it seems incredible that the Republican establishment thinks it's going to get rid of Trump by laughing at, belittling and dismissing him, and telling his voters who they should be picking.

These hysterical critics are making one of the world's most irredeemable bullies look persecuted and like a victim, a difficult feat. The desperation to get rid of him may just feed more and more into the right wing base's crazy victim complex, and in turn get Trump even more support.

...The Republican party and its allies at Fox, on afternoon radio and in the blogosphere have spent many years now whipping audiences into zombie-style bloodlusts. When it suited them, party insiders told voters across middle America that foreigners were trying to crawl through their windows to take their wives, and that stuffed suits in Washington and in the media were conspiring to enslave their children in Marxist bondage.

Now all of that paranoia is backing up on them. They created this monster, and it's coming for them now. Trumpenstein lives. He is loose in the town and on his way to the doctor's castle. We may not be laughing two years from now, but for the time being, man, what a show.

Rupert

"Rupert Is Going to Need Me to Elect the Next President"

Fox News President Roger Ailes

by Gaius Publius

In a rather public and messy way, Roger Ailes has been demoted at Fox News. It started with Rupert Murdoch's plan to pass control of his recently formed media division, 21st Century Fox, to his sons Lachlan and James.

From the Fox announcement (my emphasis mine except where noted):

Rupert Murdoch to propose 21st Century succession plan that hands control to sons James and Lachlan
 
Murdoch, the 84-year-old executive chairman and chief executive officer -- and controlling shareholder of the company -- will discuss the succession plan at the company's next board meeting. The plan reportedly calls for James to become CEO and Lachlan to serve as co-executive chairman. James currently is the company's chief operating officer.

Rupert Murdoch would continue to serve as executive chairman, according to Stuart Varney, host of Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.” Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes will continue to run the news network, reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch, according to Fox News Channel.

As the chief executive officer, James Murdoch, 42, would take over the day-to-day management of 21st Century Fox's media companies. He previously ran BSkyB before becoming chief operating officer of 21st Century Fox.

The sentence I bolded above is apparently not true and was inserted at the insistence of Ailes himself without Murdoch's knowledge.

According to Ailes' biographer, Gabriel Sherman, writing in New York Magazine:

For much of the past 15 years, Roger Ailes has operated with virtual impunity inside Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Nothing, it seemed, could induce Murdoch to rebuke Ailes publicly, even if Ailes forced Murdoch to choose between him and his sons. Such was Ailes’s power that he has been able to run a right-wing political operation under the auspices of a news channel.

This week, for the first time, there are signs that this remarkable era may be entering its twilight. Yesterday, 21st Century Fox announced that Ailes would be reporting to Lachlan and James Murdoch. For Ailes, it was a stinging smack-down and effectively a demotion.

Just five days earlier, Ailes released what now appears to be a rogue statement to his own Fox Business channel declaring that he would be unaffected by the announcement that Lachlan and James will take control of Fox as part of Rupert's succession plan. "Roger Ailes will continue to run the news network, reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch," Fox Business reported. According to a well-placed source, Ailes directed Fox Business executive Bill Shine to tell anchor Stuart Varney to read the statement on air. "Ailes told Shine to write the announcement of the move for Varney to say," the source said. "In it, Ailes inserted language that he would report to Rupert."

This was, apparently, news to Rupert. And now the Murdochs are correcting the record.

Following the move by Ailes to amend the succession announcement, Fox went to the Hollywood Reporter to "correct the record" (emphasis theirs):

Fox News' Roger Ailes to Report to James and Lachlan Murdoch, Not Rupert

Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes will in fact report to James and Lachlan Murdoch when the sons of Rupert Murdoch assume control of 21st Century Fox on July 1.

The revelation comes after the Ailes-run Fox Business Network reported June 11 that Ailes would continue to report to Rupert even after Rupert handed official control of the company to his sons.

"Roger will report to Lachlan and James but will continue his unique and long-standing relationship with Rupert,” 21st Century Fox spokesperson Nathaniel Brown said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Rupert Murdoch will transition his CEO title to James, 42, who is currently co-COO, while Lachlan, 43, will become executive co-chairman, with their 84-year-old father focusing on his chairman role. Lachlan is currently nonexecutive co-chairman.

Buried in the New York Magazine piece, however, are two noteworthy passages. The first is quoted above and repeated below:

Such was Ailes’s power that he has been able to run a right-wing political operation under the auspices of a news channel.

That's not news, but it adds a unique perspective to the demotion story. Rupert Murdoch is a political operator, not just a media mogul. He cares about power and profit, yes. But he also cares about moving the political needle and getting a political result. That's why Ailes was running Fox News for so long to begin with.

In that light, consider this:

Ailes’s contract is up in the winter of 2016. According to the many Murdoch-world sources I’ve spoken with in recent weeks, Ailes has been expecting to renew his deal. "Rupert is going to need me to elect the next president," Ailes is said to have told an associate.

The piece goes on to say that Ailes may have overplayed his hand. But I'd just like to pause here.

We know Murdoch is trying to elect (and select) the next president. Is Roger Ailes necessary to that task? That is, has the right-wing media machine hamstrung its political operation by demoting Ailes in this messy way, a way that invites retaliation?

Having Ailes on the sidelines — or at least angry and "checked out" during the 2016 campaign — may be an unappreciated advantage for the Democrat, whoever that may be.

GP

Is there a perp walk in Roger Ailes's future?

On Friday I voice the opinion that people like Roger Ailes just aren't held to account for crimes like the one he now seems clearly to have committed in pressing Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators about her affair with (ugh) Bernie Kerik. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I really don't expect it. I recycled this photo, by the way, from an October 2009 Politico puff piece with the caption: "Friends are encouraging Fox News founder Roger Ailes to run for president in 2012."

by Ken

Howie passed along the report earlier today that Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes is about to be indicted, presumably for his now-disclosed role as the previously unnamed Newscorp exec who was revealed long ago to have leaned on Judith Regan, then embattled but still in the company's employ as a book publisher, to lie to federal investigators who were vetting Rudy Giuliani crony Bernie Kerik to be the new homeland security secretary. Back in 2004 Rupert Murdoch and his people were still looking at Rudy as their guy for the future, and they didn't want his luster tarnished by squalid revelations that his man Bernie had had an extramarital affair with their gal Judith.

As it turned out, the squalid affair was almost the least of the embarrassments Battling Bernie caused his low-life patron Rudy. But at the time it was possible to imagine that the revelation could dim the luster of Master Rupert's rising star Rudy.

It didn't make a lot of sense to me, this rumor. After all, everybody has known for years about Miss Judith's claim about the pressure from above to lie to the federal investigators, and everybody also knew that there were, er, rules -- not just against lying to the investigators but against encouraging someone else to do so. It's not as if anyone in government has shown any interest in holding the previously unnamed Newscorp to account. The general belief way back when was that she had a tape of a phone conversation to back up her story, and that the existence of that tape had enabled her to wangle a $10.75M settlement to leave the company quietly. Strangely, nothing more was heard from her about this heinous crime of the unnamed Newscorp honcho.

The only thing that's changed is that, as I mentioned Friday, the New York Times's Russ Buettner pieced together information buried in the court papers for an embarrassingly related cause of action involving Miss Judith's settlement with her old Newscorp pals, which identified Ailes as the Newscorp heavy and also confirmed the existence of that embarrassing phone-conversation tape. (Buettner also laid out a compelling case for the ties between Ailes and Rudy which could have led our Roger to apply muscle on his pal's behalf.) What's so embarrassing about the related case is that it's based on allegations from the lawyers who represented Miss Judith in her old action against Newscorp that she stiffed them by firing them with a settlement in hand, thereby cheating them of their share.

The new documents emerged as part of a lawsuit filed in 2008 in which Ms. Regan’s former lawyers in the News Corporation case accused her of firing them on the eve of the settlement to avoid paying them a 25 percent contingency fee. The parties in that case signed an agreement to keep the records confidential, but it does not appear that an order sealing them was ever sent to the clerk at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and the records were placed in the public case file.

Discussion of the recorded conversation with Mr. Ailes emerges in affidavits from Ms. Regan’s former lawyers who are seeking to document the work they did on her case and for which they argue they deserve the contingency fee. They describe consulting with a forensic audio expert about the tape.

Does it really seem likely that after all these years suddenly an indictment has materialized against Ailes over that?

Well, Salon's Justin Elliott pieced together the way today's story became a story. He doesn't claim to know whether there's any truth to it, but then, it turns out that neither does the guy who, as Elliott put it, dropped the bombshell on his blog this day, economics analyst and TV commentator Barry Ritholtz.

he story, which was based on what an unnamed source told Ritholtz, quickly boomeranged around the Web and Twitter. Several well-read web sites, including Business Insider and Political Wire, picked up the report.

As it turns out, Ritholtz's source for the post was a man he happened to meet and strike up a conversation with at a Barbados airport over the weekend, he told me in an interview this afternoon.

Here's what happened, according to Ritholtz, who just got back from a vacation on the tropical island: He was sitting in the Barbados airport waiting for a plane to arrive and he struck up a conversation with an older man sitting next to him.

"We started chatting and next thing I know, we're waiting to leave the gate, his phone rings and he tells his wife, 'yeah Ailes just canceled the event,' Ritholtz says, describing the man as "obviously annoyed and frustrated."

The man runs an annual event in March at which Ailes was scheduled to speak, according to Ritholtz, who declined to specify the event. When he asked the man why Ailes canceled, the man said Ailes was about to be indicted. He describes the man, who he would not name, as an "Upper East Side Democrat."

Ritholtz says that everyone assumed any indictment would be related to a matter reported on by the New York Times last week: that Ailes allegedly told News Corp. executive Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators who were vetting Bernie Kerik, the New York police commissioner who was nominated to be the first Secretary of Homeland Security. Regan had had an affair with Kerik at a lovenest near Ground Zero; Ailes allegedly wanted to protect the political ambitions of Kerik's boss, Rudy Giuliani. The allegations emerged in a civil lawsuit filed by Regan -- who claimed that she had a phone recording of Ailes talking about the matter -- against News Corp. Much about the episode is still unclear because Regan was paid $10 million to settle the suit, and she signed a confidentiality agreement.

It's not entirely clear what Ailes would be charged with in connection with the episode. I've reached out to a Fox spokesperson for a response to all this, and I will update this post if I hear back.

Ritholtz, for his part, describes his attitude in writing the post as "passing along what an informed person had said."

"If it's true we'll find out. If it's not, no big deal," he says. "We'll see where this goes."

Well, yes, I guess we'll see. My guess is that it takes a whole lot more than this to bring down a lifelong thug like Ailes. In fact, this all has the ring of really bad -- and unfunny -- comedy, like maybe a really bad Woody Allen movie.

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