Former GOP House Speaker John Boehner, in a forthcoming book, says his efforts to dissuade then-Fox News boss Roger Ailes (photo, left), who died in 2017, from putting conspiracy nuts on the air went nowhere.
CNN, which has previewed the book, says “what Boeher writes about the role Fox News and Roger Ailes, the man who ran the network, played in seeding the ground for the rise of the conspiracy theory wing of the GOP and its eventual leader Donald J. Trump” is this:
“At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. … I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club.”
In other words, Ailes not only didn’t rein in the nonsense, he encouraged and maybe even orchestrated it. And that mattered, because he had the last word on who and what went out over the airwaves to Fox’s gullible listeners.
The result? What “Boehner exposes is that following the 2008 election of Obama, something fundamentally changed at Fox News. It was no longer about pushing conservative policy solutions and young stars of the movement. Instead, the network became a fever swamp for internet trolls pushing every sort of conspiracy theory,” CNN says about Boehner’s revelations.
And Boehner, a GOP insider and personal acquaintance of Ailes, is in a position to know what he’s talking about, although he’s not saying much that wasn’t obvious to people with critical thinking skills, i.e. that “a) Fox News took a clear turn following the 2008 election, swerving from simply a conservative tilt on news to a conspiracy-laden advocacy organization and b) Fox, not Boehner or any other elected official in the GOP, was really running the Republican Party.”
And that created the monster which became the Trump presidency after “Fox had spent almost a decade prepping the GOP base for a candidate that cared little for facts and fed them red meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
By the way, Ailes was a political operative, not a journalist, and it’s always been correct to view the network he founded and ran (until forced to resign because of rampant sexual harassment in his organization) as a partisan P.R. shop, not a legitimate news organization.
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