WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE ACQUIRE FOX NEWS?

…This News Corp Chairman needs to move on…….

 

The elderly curmudgeon Fox News chairman seems totally oblivious to reality.

 

With all the noise being made in Congress, plus the noise from Hollywood, they both are today, focused on their internal epidemics of sexual assault scandals.  I now think it’s important for us to remember where this all began.  In addition, those who had supported and endorsed this business culture for decades.

 

The reality is, that the reason that this all finally hit the fan, is that it can all be laid on News Corp, and their Fox News operation.  This organization was/is the ground-zero for "sexual-harassment-in-business", being on steroids.

 

The late Roger Ailes, founder of Fox News, and the News Corp Chairman, Rupert Murdoch, he was the chairman who allowed the management of Fox News to cover-up their sexual assault culture.  These two also agreed it was OK to absorb all of the negative costs this corrupt culture brought to their own organization.  Bill Shine, the co-president of Fox News continues to be accused of his covering up the sexual predatory culture at Fox.

 

The results to date at Fox are a loss of key Fox TV personnel such as Gretchen Carlson, Megan Kelly and Bill O’Reilly, not to mention the millions of dollars in settlement money that Fox had to pay for the sexual activities of Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Eric Bolling.  There were probably others that were paid-off, but they are hidden in their non-disclosure agreements.   That’s not to mention the millions that were paid out in the Golden Parachutes payments to both Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes upon their leaving Fox News.

 

So far, Rupert Murdoch is ignoring the sexual epidemic that hit his Fox News operation like a bomb.  He has even paid little attention to the fact that some individuals still attached to Fox are facing criminal investigations.

 

Fortunately, today at Fox News, the code of silence that protected abusive men is crumbling away.  But the elderly curmudgeon Fox News tycoon chairman seems oblivious to it all.

 

The Huffington Post recently reported that, “Current and former female Fox News employees say they are ‘stunned, disgusted and hungry for justice’ after the media mogul Murdoch dismissed allegations of sexual misconduct at the network as ‘nonsense’, outside of a few “isolated incidents’ with former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes.”

 

In a televised interview, Sky News host, Ian King asked Murdoch if sexual misconduct allegations had “inflicted damage on Fox News Channel”?

 

Murdoch's response was: “It's all nonsense.  There was a problem with our chief executive [Ailes], sort of, over the years, isolated incidents. As soon as we investigated it he was out of the place in hours, well, three or four days. And there’s been nothing else since then. That was largely political because we’re conservative. Now, of course, the liberals are going down the drain.  NBC is in deep trouble. CBS, their stars. I mean there are really bad cases and people should be moved aside. There are other things which probably amount to a bit of flirting.”

 

A Fox spokesman tried to clean up this Murdoch mess with a statement hat was bizarre, just for its sheer utter contempt for the public’s intelligence.  The spokesman totally lied that Murdoch didn’t say the sexual harassment matters at FOX News were “nonsense”, which in fact, he obviously did.  It was live and it's on tape.

 

It has been said by a number of relevant observers that the Fox network, its employees, its advertisers, its shareholders, its viewers and America in general, would all benefit if the 86-year-old Australian immigrant would step away from Fox.  Fox News in particular needs someone with a better understanding of our 21st century America, running the operation.

 

As of today, Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James, still effectively control Fox and they remain the face of Fox News.

 

To all of us, minus the deluded Trump supporters, Fox News has become a virtual horror show for victimized women, plus they are a journalistic bad joke.  It is disgraced by its cheerleading for the Trump administration; its ludicrous attacks on Trump adversaries; the attacks on the FBI as a whole; on the special prosecutor Mueller, and all of Fox's totally strange conspiracy theories.

 

It would be hard to find a better example than that of Fox News and their anti-democratic attacks on the “real” free press, and on their lack of offering real truth itself.  Fox News, and the damage they have caused to our political culture and even to the intellectual integrity of the right-wing in America, it has all become extremely hard to measure.

 

It has been reported that Murdoch had to be seriously cajoled into getting rid of Roger Ailes.  Murdoch must finally be held to account. His bizarre cluelessness reflects his inadequacy as the face of a questionable news organization struggling to recover from a sex scandal, and to maintain any concept of real respectability.

 

I personally believe that if there is no change at Fox News, what advertisers will want to have its company associated with any Fox programming, whose leader displays such self-delusion?  Why would any company want to be associated with a media outlet that tolerated the sexual abuse of their women employees over decades?  Murdoch has been and is, totally unrepentant and therefore, he is not serious about changing his company’s culture.

 

Therefore, based on all this, I am hoping that out of pure patriotic duty and serious empathy for their female victims, would someone please buy out Fox News?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017