Rolling Stone Profiles the Head Mushroom Farmer at Fox

This longish Rolling Stone piece on Roger Ailes (president, Fox Mushroom Farm) is just freaking fascinating. I'm not sure how much people know about Ailes' political consulting background (it was news to me) and I found the tidbits about his general paranoia and cock-eyed viewpoint pretty revelatory about how the news network became the exquisitely biased thing it is today.

Re: his political skullduggery as a consultant, here's a snippet of his "Willie Horton" era nonsense:

....As usual, Ailes knew how to use television to skew public perception. His dirtiest move came during the general election – a TV ad centering on Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Massachusetts prison during a weekend furlough when Michael Dukakis was governor and later assaulted a couple, stabbing the man and raping the woman. “The only question,” Ailes bragged to a reporter, “is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand – or without it.”



Knowing that such an overt move could backfire on the campaign, Ailes instead opted to evoke Horton by showing a line of convicts entering and exiting a prison through a revolving door of prison bars. An early take of the ad used actual prisoners. “Roger and I looked at it, and we worried there were too many blacks in the prison scene,” campaign manager Lee Atwater later admitted. So Ailes reshot the ad to zero in on a single black prisoner – sporting an unmistakably Horton-esque Afro. The campaign also benefited from a supposedly “independent” ad that exuberantly paraded Horton’s mug shot. The ad was crafted by Larry McCarthy – a former senior vice president at Ailes Communications Inc.


After the ’88 campaign, ailes kept on playing the Willie Horton card against Democrats. Working for Rudy Giuliani in 1989, he even tried the tactic against David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, running ads that exploited the criminal record of a Dinkins staffer who had served time for kidnapping. But this time, the tactic backfired. Dinkins made Ailes himself the issue, labeling him “the master of mud.” Giuliani lost the race, and Ailes went into a deep political slump. In 1990, he tried to take out bow-tied Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois and whiffed. The following year, he blew a special election in Pennsylvania. One political observer at the time declared that Ailes was becoming “an albatross.”

Very....low....doings. I recommend reading the whole thing. There's a new insight into awfulness on every page.  And yet, it is an even-handed piece. That's that weird thing.