Democracy & Republicanism, Journalism, Civil & Human Rights, Media & Communications, Television

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

Name: The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine
Author: David Brock
ISBN: 9780307279583

by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters for America

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Overview

Based on the meticulous research of the news watchdog organization Media Matters for America, David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt show how Fox News, under its president Roger Ailes, changed from a right-leaning news network into a partisan advocate for the Republican Party.

The Fox Effect follows the career of Ailes from his early work as a television producer and media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Consequently, when he was hired in 1996 as the president of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship conservative cable news network, Ailes had little journalism experience, but brought to the job the mindset of a political operative. As Brock and Rabin-Havt demonstrate through numerous examples, Ailes used his extraordinary power and influence to spread a partisan political agenda that is at odds with long-established, widely held standards of fairness and objectivity in news reporting.

Featuring transcripts of leaked audio and memos from Fox News reporters and executives, The Fox Effect is a damning indictment of how the network’s news coverage and commentators have biased reporting, drummed up marginal stories, and even consciously manipulated established facts in their efforts to attack the Obama administration.

About the Author, David Brock

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

David Brock, the founder and CEO of Media Matters, is the author of five books, including The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, and his bestselling memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

Ari Rabin-Havt is Media Matters's vice president of research and communication.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Fox News gets subjected to a strong dose of investigative journalism in this book by the leaders of "news watchdog organization" Media Matters for America; the resulting portrait is at best unflattering and at worst sinister. Brock (The Republican Noise Machine) and Rabin-Havt present their evidence, beginning with the "Rise of Roger" Ailes, Fox president and, according to the authors, the driving force behind the network's transformation from conservative news source to mouthpiece for the Republican Party. The instances of fear-mongering are so absurd they would be funny if they weren't so pernicious: Glenn Beck saying to Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies;" comparisons of liberals to Hitler and Nazis; the spread of the claim that President Obama's health care reform included "death panels;" Beck saying on air that Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people; and so on. In this diligently documented book, Brock and Rabin-Havt leave us with the warning that "the single most important player" in the upcoming election will be none other than Fox News. Photos.
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Library Journal

This exposé of Fox News comes out just in time for the 2012 presidential election campaign. Both high-level officers of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters, Brock (founder and CEO) and Rabin-Havt (vice president, research and communication) trace Roger Ailes's career from his work as a political media consultant to President Nixon to his shaping of Fox News into a conservative political force. His influence and the slant of the network are clearly demonstrated with a detailed analysis of the content of news programs, along with transcripts of leaked memoranda from network executives. For example, in Brock and Rabin-Havt's examination of Fox's coverage of the Tea Party movement, it becomes evident that the network played a major role in the party's creation. The authors' message is that objectivity can no longer be assumed to be a value held by news media organizations, and consumers should be on the alert for slanted coverage. VERDICT Liberals and media scholars already suspicious of Fox will appreciate this exposure of conservative bias. Fans of Fox will dismiss it as propaganda. General readers may be overwhelmed by the detail.—Judy Solberg, Seattle Univ. Lib.

Kirkus Reviews

A thorough catalogue of Fox News president Roger Ailes' misdeeds as head of the controversial network. Brock, the founder and CEO of Media Matters, and Rabin-Havt, the organization's executive vice president, have reason to despise the man at the center of their new book. In the epilogue, they detail the well-publicized and vicious personal smears Ailes authorized in retaliation for their organization's critical coverage of Fox. According to a psychiatrist brought onto a Fox News talk show to assess his mental health, Brock is a "very dangerous man." Brock and Rabin-Havt paint Ailes as a petty, vindictive right-wing ideologue whose ruthlessness is untempered by any sense of obligation to truth, fairness or basic human decency. Given that their book draws on years of research and includes comprehensive footnotes, unlike Fox News' widely debunked on-air reporting, the authors' damning portrait of Ailes is quite a bit more credible than the assertions of various Fox News personalities that Brock is "full of self-hatred" and President Obama attended a radical madrassa and may not have been born in the United States. While the majority of the book is well-documented enough to be convincing, Brock and Rabin-Havt occasionally draw on sources of questionable merit--e.g., Gawker. Their most devastating source is Fox News itself, a network that makes little secret of its own bias. Worth reading for anyone who suspects Fox News of distorting the truth and is eager to spend hours sifting through the evidence. For those observant and literate enough to have seen through Fox from the beginning, this book feels like an exhaustively researched exercise in stating the obvious.