As Fox smears Obama, Ailes receives First Amendment award

We mentioned on January 16 that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is slated to receive the First Amendment Leadership Award from the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF). On March 8, Ailes will join past recipients such as Katherine Graham, the Washington Post publisher who presided over the paper’s Watergate reporting; First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, who helped defend the New York Times when the Nixon administration attempted to quash the publication of the Pentagon Papers; Ted Turner, who founded CNN and brought a new world of extended news coverage to the country; and Don Hewitt, who originated 60 Minutes, the first and for many years the finest major network investigative news magazine.

The RTNDF press release announcing the award said Ailes earned it by bringing his right-wing news smear operation to the top of the cable ratings heap. We’re bringing it up now to remind you that an award aimed at honoring those who promote freedom of the press is going to the man who presides over the likes of John Gibson, the Fox News talking head who continues to smear Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as an Islamic terrorist version of The Manchurian Candidate because he attended an Islamic elementary school as a child in Indonesia.

What Gibson did — and Fox News host Steve Doocy before him — is direct hate speech at Obama. The junior Senator from Illinois is not a Muslim but even if he were, as is Minnesota’s new Democratic Congressional representative Keith Ellison, the overt attempt to associate him and every other kid who attended an Islamic school, no matter their religion, with terrorism, is despicable. That Ailes should win an award based upon his success at bringing hate speech into the mainstream of institutional “news,” and dragging his competitors into the mud along with him, is equally despicable.

You might want to contact the RTNDF and ask them what First Amendment benefits accrue from Ailes’s success at debasing both the concept and the practice of television news, and whether or not those benefits really elevate Ailes to the stature of Graham, Abrams, Turner and Hewitt. You can contact RTNDF president Barbara Cochran by email here, or by telephone at 202.467.5205. If you do contact her, please don’t sink to Ailes’s level.

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8 Responses to “As Fox smears Obama, Ailes receives First Amendment award”

1. 1
   Joe Says:
   

   Sounds like a candidate for a movie, just like Larry Flynt.

   Good journalism is also having the candidate’s cousin — who made his bias well known — on your election team, so he can be unprofessionally influenced by “Jebbie” and start the ball rolling for a bad call of the state, setting a bandwagon effect in the process. (“How To Steal An Election”)

   January 24th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
2. 2
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   All things great and small. It’s just amazing. Thanks for invoking the image of Ailes in an American flag diaper.

   January 24th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
3. 3
   David Says:
   

   I did just write to Barbar Cochran:

   I am writing to you to express my honest surprise to learn that Roger Ailes is to receive the RTNDF First Amendment Leadership Award.

   I absolutely abhor Fox “news” and I cannot see a single reason whatsoever that the chairman of Fox is to receive such a prestigious award.

   Fox is a never-ending horror-show of “how low can you go”, myopic yet self-aggrandizing and arrogantly ignorant farce of an imitation of balanced journalism.

   What Ailes has brought is “info-tainment” , with an organization that deserves real credit for its commitment to spreading the unabashedly Orwellian newspeak of the current adminstration, and in actively seeking to dumb down national dialog.

   One need only look as far as the recent scandal of a wholly juvenile attempt to smear senator Barack Obama, to find real assurance that Fox has no interest in pursuing – let alone preserving – journalistic integrity.

   Thank-you for your time and consideration.

   Yours aghast,

   – David.

   January 27th, 2007 at 6:54 am
4. 4
   Radio Left Says:
   

   Mikes Blog Roundup

   Crooks and Liars

   Politics in the Zeros: Thousands will be in Washington, D.C. today to emphasize the unmistakable mandate which American voters gave congress last November: Bring The Troops Home Now! The Osterley Times: An EU inquiry has concluded th…

   January 27th, 2007 at 8:15 am
5. 5
   Weldon Berger Says:
   

   David, let me know if you hear back from her. I haven’t.

   January 27th, 2007 at 11:32 am
6. 6
   cw Says:
   

   Hey, there are some folks pushing to give Sun Myung Moon the Nobel Peace Prize.

   The man disrupted families the world over, has been found guilty of swindling hundreds of millions of dollars targeting widows in Japan, and funded/befriended about every right wing torture boy South America suffered through from Stroessner to Pinochet…

   I guess he’s due too…

   January 27th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
7. 7
   Joe Says:
   

   At your service.

   January 27th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
8. 8
   David Says:
   

   Not a word from Barbara Cochran, but I never expected any reply.

   January 28th, 2007 at 11:22 am

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