Monday, March 24, 2014

The Amazing Profits at FOX News

I had no idea they were this strong.

Steve Coll writes as part of a The New York Review of Books essay on the Gabriel Sherman book, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country:
The network's profits in 2012 were just under $1 billio according to the Pew Research Center. Its profit margin has been above 50 percent i recent years, a rate almost unheard of in mainstream business.
Coll in the essay also reveals how Ailes launched his career:
[In 1968,] Ailes sold himself with a memo to Nixon aides. "Television is a 'hit and run' medium," he advised. During political debates and talk shows, "the general public is just not sophisticated enough to wade through answers." Nixon should therefore use "more descriptive visual phrases" and end his statements with "kickers."

With some trepidation, Nixon's team gave Ailes a job. He was then only twenty-eight...

His shrewdest move was to cooperate with the journalist Joe McGinnis on what became the best selling book The Selling of the President. McGiinnis's portrait of Ailes as a manipulator of public opinion aroused that age's anxieties about television's potential for subliminal suggestion.

After Nixon's victory, Ailes leveraged the reputation of McGinis's book gave him to  win political consulting contracts.



6 comments:

  1. Attender of a Mega-Church = moron Fox News viewer.

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  2. Someone who feels the urge to ridicule others= liberal.

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  3. There are vast hordes of people out there who hate "progressives", the "progressive" media and academia. It was a wise choice for libertarians to appeal almost exclusively to hipsters who generally hate our guts while ignoring the right of the religiously pious to live as the choose, right?

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    1. The libertarians are not excluding Christians from their propaganda. Ron Paul, Gary North, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy and many others are all working hard to introduce the Christians to Kochanomics.

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    2. Damn Jerry, I wondered where you've been all day. Must be done doing chores for you mom, huh?

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    3. No, he was waiting for the sun to drop behind the hills so he wouldn't turn to stone.

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