For the last month, all of America has been watching former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes go from one of the most powerful people in media to that weird, pervy guy who rides the light rail at two in the morning. His fall from grace has truly been a sight to behold. During this month-long “existential crisis” rocking Fox News, there has been no shortage of conjecture — where the hell did Andrea Tantaros go? — and dramatic revelation, such as a story told by CNN’s Brian Stelter Tuesday.
This might be the strangest thing to come out of this saga yet.
According to Stelter, when he was still an up-and-coming reporter, he briefly dated a Fox News staffer who turned out to be a spy. Yes, sir, according to Brian Stelter, Roger Ailes resorted to good ol’ fashioned espionage while chief executive for Fox News, telling a panel composed of Bill Carter, Alisyn Camerota, and Chris Cuomo:
“In terms of the money, this is Gabriel Sherman’s reporting in New York magazine. He’s been a leader on this story, wrote a book about Roger Ailes a number of years ago. A lot of what he’s reporting I think reporters have suspected for a while. I’ll give you an example. About ten years ago I had a crush on a woman at Fox News. She was a low level staffer. I was in college at the time. So I was going out on what I thought were dates. Chris, I thought these were dates. These were not dates. She was actually reporting back to Fox News about me. She was reporting back about what I thought of her and about CNN and MSNBC and Fox. Because I was a reporter on the beat, they were actually spying on me that way. Now I didn’t think that was a big deal at the time. I thought it was the way Fox operates. Fox is a political organization. But now we know they were actually sending out private investigators. They were tailing other reporters.”
Holy shit! Espionage?
Bill Carter, a CNN media analyst, chimed in following Stelter’s tale of college flings converging with media corruption:
“They were following reporters around. We knew covering Fox you’d have to deal with that. You’d get a call from them saying, ‘You better be right on this story’ or the implication was, ‘We’ll dig into your past, we’ll dig into your private life.'”
Stelter hammered the point home:
“So we sort of knew but now we know much much more. Because these reports, like from Gabriel Sherman, saying that money, that Ailes was using Fox News money, for his own private spending.”
So over the last month or so, we have seen Roger Ailes go from the juggernaut chief executive of a sexualized cable news network unfamiliar with reality to an accused sexual harasser of women to a Cold War-era American president. My how the mighty have fallen.
Here is Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks talking about the Fox News “Black Room,” a horrid place on the 14th floor of the News Corp Building where Ailes’ minions operated to try and discredit his rivals.
Featured image by DonkeyHotey, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
h/t Raw Story
