The Agenda of Fox News Many Have Forgotten and Many Do Not Know

posted by Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse

I wrote about this in 2014/2015, followed the dynamic and refreshed it again in 2017. However, with increased sunlight on the agenda of Fox News, perhaps a review of this history is needed again. Back when the 2014 “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” agenda was swirling in the senate; you might remember the “gang of eight” immigration bill; specific media entities inside and outside FOX media were involved in private discussions to promote the agenda.  {GO DEEP}

Two of those outside FOX voices were Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson; so it was not a surprise to see FOX News Rupert Murdoch hire them later as prime-time hosts. This is all about following the money and the FOX agenda; ie. inside baseball stuff:

During the 2015 Fox Business News GOP Primary debate several political junkies noted a rather curious and brutally obvious omission: Senator Marco Rubio was never questioned about the 2013 Senate Gang-of-Eight bill and his stance on Comprehensive Immigration Reform. In fact, if you were to review the 2015 debate substance you’d note candidate Rubio wasn’t directly questioned about his immigration positions at all.

It is not disconnected that during the 2013/2014 Gang-of-Eight immigration constructs we later discovered Fox News was an active participant in the promotion of the immigration reform proposals.

In order to facilitate the congressional immigration intent Fox launched a previously unknown pro-amnesty propaganda blitz to support senate immigration bill.

What follows below is an evidenced expose’ of their agenda.

Candidate Jeb Bush attends Chamber of Commerce dinner with Fox’s Rupert Murdoch and Valerie Jarrett (December 2014)

♦ It was in 2014 when writer Mickey Kaus was chastised by Tucker Carlson, then a Fox contributor and now prime-time show host, for writing an article in the Daily Caller outlining the relationship between Rupert Murdoch, his company Fox News, the talking heads under his control and authority, and Murdoch’s request for pro-amnesty propaganda to be broadcast on the network.

Tucker Carlson took down the article from the Daily Caller, and subsequently Mickey Kaus quit in disgust over the agenda-driven editorial decision. Apparently some things are just too sensitive for sunlight and exposure.

However, what Mickey Kaus outlined was a pattern within Fox to push immigration reform and included a first person excerpt between David Axelrod and Rupert Murdoch:

On page 424 of his recent memoir, Obama’s former top strategist David Axelrod describes running into Fox chieftain (and immigration amnesty supporter) Rupert Murdoch at a dinner in the fall of 2010:

During the dinner, Murdoch, who was seated beside me, insisted that the president had to move on immigration reform. ….

“But the solution has to be comprehensive,” I said. “We can’t just attack a piece of the immigration problem. And you know, there’s one big thing that you can do to help, and that is to keep your cable network from stoking the nativism that keeps us from solving this.” [Emphasis added] (link)

Kaus goes on to outline how Fox News followed the plan and conspicuously avoided any mention of the crafting: “in the spring of 2013 when the “Gang of 8” amnesty bill snuck through the Senate“. Mickey uses a historical timeline, day-by-day story leads, showing how Fox was intentionally NOT COVERING the story (see here).

♦ However, even before Kaus discovered -and outlined- proof of what his research into Fox revealed there was a prior article written by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker Magazine [June 2013] which was even more revealing:

New Yorker 2013 – […] Fox News has notably changed its tone since the election. A Democratic policy staffer who worked on the issue in 2007 and has helped write the current bill said, “NumbersUSA and FAIR”—two groups that want to dramatically limit immigration—“managed to convince Fox News back then to be their twenty-four-hour news channel of the anti-immigrant point of view. Fox has now totally bought in to the idea that we just need to figure something out.”

Rush Limbaugh, who fiercely opposes the bill, has come to sound resigned. “I don’t know if there’s any stopping this,” he said on January 28th, the day the Gang held the press conference announcing its framework for the legislation. “It’s up to me and Fox News, and I don’t think Fox News is that invested in this.”

McCain told me, “Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too.” Murdoch is the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corp., which owns Fox, and Ailes is Fox News’s president.

McCain said that he, Graham, Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto, who are now relatively sympathetic to the Gang’s proposed bill. Hannity voiced support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which he previously dismissed as “amnesty,” on the day after the 2012 election. “God bless Fox,” Graham said. “Last time, it was ‘amnesty’ every fifteen seconds.”

He said that the change was important for his reelection, because “eighty per cent of people in my primary get their news from Fox.” He added that the network has “allowed critics to come forward, but it’s been so much better.” (link)

So there’s a trio of GOPe Republicans in the so-called Gang of Eight huddled with leading figures at Fox News Channel. A few days later Bill O’Reilly interviews Marco Rubio and urges the Senator to come to him if anyone opposes the proposal.

♦ As you watch this segment in retrospect, with the information you now possess, consider that both Bill O’Reilly and Marco Rubio have pre-discussed the entire topic and worked out exactly what the framework of questions and answers would be:

Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the entire GOPe apparatus -including House Speaker Paul Ryan- are 100% behind comprehensive immigration reform to include amnesty.

Back to Fox News and their debate agenda – The executive in charge of Fox News debate programming, debate questioning and debate structure is Vice President Bill Sammon. (circled below)

The Washington Post has an outline describing how Bill Sammon runs the entire show at Fox regarding debates; and how he is the person who Chris Stirewalt, Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace and Brett Baier directly reported to for all debate issues, construction, and question organization.

In essence, Bill Sammon runs the show.

Bill Sammon’s daughter is Brooke Sammon who was the national press secretary for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.

Now, lets contrast this information against the backdrop of Rupert Murdoch’s response to the republican debate.

There is a particular clarity that resonates, no?

Mr. Rupert Murdoch, who is also leading the executive decision-making on Fox programming, also contracts pollster Frank Luntz to appear on Fox News broadcasting during the 2015 and 2016 election cycle.

[…] since June, Murdoch has been attending Ailes’s daily executive meeting held on the second floor of Fox headquarters. The secretive afternoon gathering in Ailes’s conference room is attended by about a half-dozen of the network’s most senior lieutenants. It’s where some of the most sensitive decisions about running the channel are discussed. (link)

Frank Luntz had sub-contracts with Marco Rubio and a long-term relationship with Rubio going back to the Freshman Senator’s time in the Florida Legislature. Rubio alone has paid Luntz $350,000+ It’s not accidental that Frank Luntz focus groups regularly found Marco Rubio as the winner of debate and opinion programming.

In an extensive 2016 article within New York Magazine, mostly outlining the rather sordid details of Roger Ailes, readers may also noted confirmation from August of (2015). Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch instructed Fox News executives to take down candidate Donald Trump.

Excerpt:

(NY MAG) […] Murdoch was not a fan of Trump’s and especially did not like his stance on immigration. (The antipathy was mutual: “Murdoch’s been very bad to me,” Trump told me in March.) A few days before the first GOP debate on Fox in August 2015, Murdoch called Ailes at home. “This has gone on long enough,” Murdoch said, according to a person briefed on the conversation.

Murdoch told Ailes he wanted Fox’s debate moderators — Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace — to hammer Trump on a variety of issues. Ailes, understanding the GOP electorate better than most at that point, likely thought it was a bad idea. “Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee,” Ailes told a colleague around this time. But he didn’t fight Murdoch on the debate directive.

On the night of August 6, in front of 24 million people, the Fox moderators peppered Trump with harder-hitting questions. But it was Kelly’s question regarding Trump’s history of crude comments about women that created a media sensation. He seemed personally wounded by her suggestion that this spoke to a temperament that might not be suited for the presidency. “I’ve been very nice to you, though I could probably maybe not be based on the way you have treated me,” he said pointedly. (read more)

A July 2017 article written by Roger Ailes confidant Michael Wolff affirms one of the more transparently obvious hidden secrets in the 2015/2016 presidential race and election.

Fox News owner/mogul Rupert Murdoch was intensely against the candidacy of Donald Trump. So much so that Murdoch instructed former President of Fox News, Roger Ailes, to shape favorable coverage toward anyone other than Donald Trump, including a request to tilt toward support for Hillary Clinton.

New York – […] It was Ailes’ tacit support of Trump that, in part, made his removal from Fox all the more urgent for the Murdochs. And it was not just the liberal sons who were agitated by Ailes’ regard for Trump, but also the father, whose tabloid, the New York Post, helped create Trump, but who found him now, with great snobbery, not of “our” conservative class. (“When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch senior tweeted the day after Trump officially declared himself a candidate.)

Murdoch instructed Ailes to tilt to anyone but Trump, Ailes confided to me before he was fired, even Hillary. (Ailes, for his part, characterized Murdoch’s periodic efforts at interference as similar to Nixon’s instructions to bomb this or that country — best ignored.)

After the election, a confounded Murdoch had to call on his ex-wife Wendi’s friends, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to broker a rapprochement with the disreputable Donald. Now, to Trump’s great satisfaction, a humbled Murdoch is a constant caller. (read more)

All intellectually honest media and political observers already knew this was the basic premise for Fox News in the 2015/2016 presidential race. Murdoch supported Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as the frontrunners because each of them advanced policies that were beneficial to the interests of Rupert Murdoch.

The August 2015 ambush by Murdoch’s princess Megyn Kelly was merely a highly visible example of Murdoch’s aversion to the ‘America-First’ agenda of Donald Trump. Ms. Kelly was later paid $10 million by Harper Collins, another Murdoch company, as compensation for services rendered, ie. advance payment on her book deal.

However, what most people don’t recognize is the motives behind these activities. There were/are billions of dollars at stake from the policies and outcomes of the election.

Maintaining control of multinational corporate trade policy and influence; along with retention of multinational “Wall Street” banking policy; in conjunction with open border mass immigration policy is still the primary objective of the Big Club.