Mayer writes: "This election year, the big question was supposed to be
whether Hillary Clinton would shatter the glass ceiling. Instead, it has
become the year in which one of the country's most towering glass houses has
shattered."
Sexual-harassment allegations against the former Fox News chairman Roger
Ailes, left, have raised questions over how network executives justified
their coverage in the nineties of Bill Clinton. (photo: Allan
Tannengaum/Getty)
Roger Ailes, the Clintons, and the Scandals of the Scandalmongers
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
25 August 16
This election year, the big question was supposed to be whether Hillary
Clinton would shatter the glass ceiling. Instead, it has become the year in
which one of the countrys most towering glass houses has shattered. Few
people may remember it now, but Fox News, which Rupert Murdochs News
Corporation launched in 1996, became a ratings leader largely because of its
gleefully censorious coverage of Bill Clintons sex scandals. Now the
network is mired in its own scandal. Last month, Roger Ailes resigned as Fox
Newss chairman and C.E.O. in the face of multiple allegations of sexual
harassment, including a lawsuit filed against him by the former anchor
Gretchen Carlson. (Ailes has denied Carlsons allegations.) The unfolding
embarrassment at the network poses a host of questionsnot the least of
which is how the networks executives justified their Javert-like pursuit of
Clintons extramarital affairs, given their bosss own repeated sexual
misconduct. If you go back and look carefully at the chronology, some of
Ailess most egregious alleged harassment of women was taking place at the
same time that Fox News was suggesting that Clinton deserved to be
impeached. Sexual harassment is a serious issue, and it merits serious
coverage, but its hard to believe that the suits at Fox were motivated by
genuine concern, given their own corporate culture.
Gabriel Sherman, in his 2014 book The Loudest Voice in the Room, describes
how brilliantly and relentlessly Ailes exploited Clintons scandalous affair
with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky in order to build Fox Newss
brand. Sherman writes, Whatever else it was, the scandal was a media
bonanza, and no medium benefited from it more than cable newsand no cable
channel more than Fox News. Within hours of the Lewinsky story breaking, in
January, 1998, Ailes inaugurated a new nightly show devoted to the
melodrama, and assigned five producers and correspondents to cover it. No
detail was too sordid for Fox to cover. With Ailes, a former Republican
political operative, at the helm, Fox covered the affair as a criminal act,
and rode the story straight up the cable-ratings charts. Monica was a news
channels dream come true, John Moody, Foxs executive editor, once
admitted.
Fox News has devoted considerably less attention to its own sex scandal.
When the network announced Ailess departure, his alleged improprieties were
not mentioned. Carlsons attorneys told the Guardian that at least twenty
women have accused Ailes of sexually harassing them throughout his career.
Carlson and the anchor Megyn Kelly, who has also reportedly alleged that she
was harassed by Ailes, are the best known among these women, but the story
of Laurie Luhn, the former head of booking for Fox News, is especially
damning.
Luhns account, if true, suggests that, at precisely the same time Ailes was
leading Foxs breathless coverage of the Clinton-impeachment proceedings,
Ailes, who was married, was paying Luhnwho was single, broke, and decades
youngerto service him sexually. In a recent blockbuster interview with
Sherman, in New York, Luhn said that she met Ailes in 1988. Soon afterward,
Ailes began paying her a monthly retainer, for sex and for private research
on his competitors. When he helped launch Fox, in 1996, Luhn said, Ailes
offered her a staff job in guest relations. Over time, her job
descriptions at Fox changed, but Ailes, whom Luhn described as a predator,
did not. She told Sherman that her twenty-year involvement with Ailes had
been psychological torture. As she grew increasingly unhappy, she said,
Ailes grew more controlling, insisting that she tell no one of their sexual
relations. Luhn told Sherman that Ailes kept an incriminating videotape of
her in a safe-deposit vault, as a form of insurance. By 2011, however, Luhn
said, she had informed Foxs general counsel that Ailes had sexually
harassed her for decades. All of this might sound hard to believe, and Luhn
has acknowledged a history of psychological difficulties. But Ailes and his
lawyers declined an invitation from Sherman to rebut Luhns story. Moreover,
in 2011, Fox agreed to pay Luhn an astounding $3.15-million severance
agreement, which included nondisclosure clauses. It looks a lot like hush
money, paid for with corporate funds and handled by multiple Fox executives.
Yet, if silencing Luhn was the aim, it hasnt worked. Luhn was reportedly
among the first women to contact investigators hired by Fox, in the wake of
Carlsons lawsuit, to straighten out the twisted truth about sexual
harassment at the company.
Fox viewers were, of course, left in the dark about Ailess personal life as
the network relentlessly exposed Clintons private life. The campaign was
nearly successful. On December 19, 1998, the Republican-ruled House of
Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on two articles, for perjury and
obstruction of justice, contending that he had lied under oath about his
extramarital affair with Lewinsky. The Senate eventually acquitted Clinton,
after a highly partisan trial.
Here, too, hindsight has revealed more hypocrisy. The drive to impeach
Clinton was led by three successive House Republican leaders. As
ThinkProgress noted last year, each of these self-styled moral authorities
was subsequently tarnished in his own extramarital sex scandal. Newt
Gingrich, the first Speaker to whip his members into an impeachment frenzy,
has since acknowledged that during the same period he was engaged in an
extramarital affair with a congressional aide, who was then in her twenties.
Gingrich subsequently got divorced and married the aide, Callista Bisek, who
became his third wife. (His second wife has also said that he began an
affair with her while still married to his first, who, at the time, was
recovering from cancer. Gingrich has never specifically admitted to that
affair.) All the while, he was publicly castigating Democrats as the party
of moral degeneration. For example, while the Democratic Party was
nominating Clinton, in 1992, Gingrich introduced George H. W. Bush at a
campaign stop by declaring that Woody Allens non-family was one that
fits the Democratic platform perfectly, because Allen was having
non-incest with a non-daughter to whom he was a non-father.
Gingrich resigned from the House Speakership in November, 1998, at which
point the Republican House members unanimously voted to pass the gavel to
Bob Livingston, a congressman from Louisiana. Less than two months later, on
the same day that the House was scheduled to vote on Clintons impeachment,
Livingston announced that he would not assume the Speakership. Larry Flynt,
the publisher of Hustler, had revealed that he had gathered evidence that
Livingston had been involved with at least four women during the previous
decade.
After Livingston stepped down, the Republican majority in the House voted to
replace him with Dennis Hastert, an amiable-seeming congressman from
Illinois. Hastert spoke of how his conscience had led him to the solemn
conclusion that Clinton had abused and violated the public trust and
therefore needed to be impeached. In 2015, Hastert was revealed to have
sexually abused a boy during his years as a wrestling coach in Illinois,
between the mid-sixties and early eighties; according to prosecutors at his
later trial, the number of known victims has climbed to five. This past
October, Hastert pleaded guilty to bank fraud, and in April admitted to the
abuse at his sentencing hearing. He had concealed an effort to buy the
silence of his victims, through payments that amounted to more than three
million dollars. The presiding judge called him a serial child molester
before sentencing him to serve fifteen months in federal prison. (He was not
charged for the abuse because the statute of limitations had passed.)
Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp., has stepped in to temporarily fill
Ailess shoes at Fox News, but he has his own baggage. According to the Wall
Street Journal and Vanity Fair, Murdochs second marriage was upended, in
1999, by an extramarital affair with Wendi Deng, a young émigré from China
and an intern at Murdochs Star TV. The affair likely overlapped with the
Clinton impeachment proceedings. Murdochs marriage to Deng ended fourteen
years later, again amid sensational rumors of infidelity.
The Clintons, by contrast, have remained married. Its impossible for anyone
on the outside to judge whether that is a marital triumph or a Faustian
bargain. Will past Clinton scandals become a focus of the fall campaign?
Its possible. Trump, who has admitted to his own sexual infidelities, is
reportedly now being advised by Ailes. Trump has called Bill Clinton the
worst abuser of women in the history of politics, and said that his sex
scandals are fair game. Voters may or may not be swayed by the the
exhumation of such arguments, this time around. But the unending scandals of
the scandalmongers have made one thing clear: neither party has a lock on
virtue.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Sexual-harassment allegations against the former Fox News chairman Roger
Ailes, left, have raised questions over how network executives justified
their coverage in the nineties of Bill Clinton. (photo: Allan
Tannengaum/Getty)
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/roger-ailes-the-clintons-and-the
-scandals-of-the-scandalmongershttp://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/r
oger-ailes-the-clintons-and-the-scandals-of-the-scandalmongers
Roger Ailes, the Clintons, and the Scandals of the Scandalmongers
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
25 August 16
his election year, the big question was supposed to be whether Hillary
Clinton would shatter the glass ceiling. Instead, it has become the year in
which one of the countrys most towering glass houses has shattered. Few
people may remember it now, but Fox News, which Rupert Murdochs News
Corporation launched in 1996, became a ratings leader largely because of its
gleefully censorious coverage of Bill Clintons sex scandals. Now the
network is mired in its own scandal. Last month, Roger Ailes resigned as Fox
Newss chairman and C.E.O. in the face of multiple allegations of sexual
harassment, including a lawsuit filed against him by the former anchor
Gretchen Carlson. (Ailes has denied Carlsons allegations.) The unfolding
embarrassment at the network poses a host of questionsnot the least of
which is how the networks executives justified their Javert-like pursuit of
Clintons extramarital affairs, given their bosss own repeated sexual
misconduct. If you go back and look carefully at the chronology, some of
Ailess most egregious alleged harassment of women was taking place at the
same time that Fox News was suggesting that Clinton deserved to be
impeached. Sexual harassment is a serious issue, and it merits serious
coverage, but its hard to believe that the suits at Fox were motivated by
genuine concern, given their own corporate culture.
Gabriel Sherman, in his 2014 book The Loudest Voice in the Room, describes
how brilliantly and relentlessly Ailes exploited Clintons scandalous affair
with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky in order to build Fox Newss
brand. Sherman writes, Whatever else it was, the scandal was a media
bonanza, and no medium benefited from it more than cable newsand no cable
channel more than Fox News. Within hours of the Lewinsky story breaking, in
January, 1998, Ailes inaugurated a new nightly show devoted to the
melodrama, and assigned five producers and correspondents to cover it. No
detail was too sordid for Fox to cover. With Ailes, a former Republican
political operative, at the helm, Fox covered the affair as a criminal act,
and rode the story straight up the cable-ratings charts. Monica was a news
channels dream come true, John Moody, Foxs executive editor, once
admitted.
Fox News has devoted considerably less attention to its own sex scandal.
When the network announced Ailess departure, his alleged improprieties were
not mentioned. Carlsons attorneys told the Guardian that at least twenty
women have accused Ailes of sexually harassing them throughout his career.
Carlson and the anchor Megyn Kelly, who has also reportedly alleged that she
was harassed by Ailes, are the best known among these women, but the story
of Laurie Luhn, the former head of booking for Fox News, is especially
damning.
Luhns account, if true, suggests that, at precisely the same time Ailes was
leading Foxs breathless coverage of the Clinton-impeachment proceedings,
Ailes, who was married, was paying Luhnwho was single, broke, and decades
youngerto service him sexually. In a recent blockbuster interview with
Sherman, in New York, Luhn said that she met Ailes in 1988. Soon afterward,
Ailes began paying her a monthly retainer, for sex and for private research
on his competitors. When he helped launch Fox, in 1996, Luhn said, Ailes
offered her a staff job in guest relations. Over time, her job
descriptions at Fox changed, but Ailes, whom Luhn described as a predator,
did not. She told Sherman that her twenty-year involvement with Ailes had
been psychological torture. As she grew increasingly unhappy, she said,
Ailes grew more controlling, insisting that she tell no one of their sexual
relations. Luhn told Sherman that Ailes kept an incriminating videotape of
her in a safe-deposit vault, as a form of insurance. By 2011, however, Luhn
said, she had informed Foxs general counsel that Ailes had sexually
harassed her for decades. All of this might sound hard to believe, and Luhn
has acknowledged a history of psychological difficulties. But Ailes and his
lawyers declined an invitation from Sherman to rebut Luhns story. Moreover,
in 2011, Fox agreed to pay Luhn an astounding $3.15-million severance
agreement, which included nondisclosure clauses. It looks a lot like hush
money, paid for with corporate funds and handled by multiple Fox executives.
Yet, if silencing Luhn was the aim, it hasnt worked. Luhn was reportedly
among the first women to contact investigators hired by Fox, in the wake of
Carlsons lawsuit, to straighten out the twisted truth about sexual
harassment at the company.
Fox viewers were, of course, left in the dark about Ailess personal life as
the network relentlessly exposed Clintons private life. The campaign was
nearly successful. On December 19, 1998, the Republican-ruled House of
Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on two articles, for perjury and
obstruction of justice, contending that he had lied under oath about his
extramarital affair with Lewinsky. The Senate eventually acquitted Clinton,
after a highly partisan trial.
Here, too, hindsight has revealed more hypocrisy. The drive to impeach
Clinton was led by three successive House Republican leaders. As
ThinkProgress noted last year, each of these self-styled moral authorities
was subsequently tarnished in his own extramarital sex scandal. Newt
Gingrich, the first Speaker to whip his members into an impeachment frenzy,
has since acknowledged that during the same period he was engaged in an
extramarital affair with a congressional aide, who was then in her twenties.
Gingrich subsequently got divorced and married the aide, Callista Bisek, who
became his third wife. (His second wife has also said that he began an
affair with her while still married to his first, who, at the time, was
recovering from cancer. Gingrich has never specifically admitted to that
affair.) All the while, he was publicly castigating Democrats as the party
of moral degeneration. For example, while the Democratic Party was
nominating Clinton, in 1992, Gingrich introduced George H. W. Bush at a
campaign stop by declaring that Woody Allens non-family was one that
fits the Democratic platform perfectly, because Allen was having
non-incest with a non-daughter to whom he was a non-father.
Gingrich resigned from the House Speakership in November, 1998, at which
point the Republican House members unanimously voted to pass the gavel to
Bob Livingston, a congressman from Louisiana. Less than two months later, on
the same day that the House was scheduled to vote on Clintons impeachment,
Livingston announced that he would not assume the Speakership. Larry Flynt,
the publisher of Hustler, had revealed that he had gathered evidence that
Livingston had been involved with at least four women during the previous
decade.
After Livingston stepped down, the Republican majority in the House voted to
replace him with Dennis Hastert, an amiable-seeming congressman from
Illinois. Hastert spoke of how his conscience had led him to the solemn
conclusion that Clinton had abused and violated the public trust and
therefore needed to be impeached. In 2015, Hastert was revealed to have
sexually abused a boy during his years as a wrestling coach in Illinois,
between the mid-sixties and early eighties; according to prosecutors at his
later trial, the number of known victims has climbed to five. This past
October, Hastert pleaded guilty to bank fraud, and in April admitted to the
abuse at his sentencing hearing. He had concealed an effort to buy the
silence of his victims, through payments that amounted to more than three
million dollars. The presiding judge called him a serial child molester
before sentencing him to serve fifteen months in federal prison. (He was not
charged for the abuse because the statute of limitations had passed.)
Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp., has stepped in to temporarily fill
Ailess shoes at Fox News, but he has his own baggage. According to the Wall
Street Journal and Vanity Fair, Murdochs second marriage was upended, in
1999, by an extramarital affair with Wendi Deng, a young émigré from China
and an intern at Murdochs Star TV. The affair likely overlapped with the
Clinton impeachment proceedings. Murdochs marriage to Deng ended fourteen
years later, again amid sensational rumors of infidelity.
The Clintons, by contrast, have remained married. Its impossible for anyone
on the outside to judge whether that is a marital triumph or a Faustian
bargain. Will past Clinton scandals become a focus of the fall campaign?
Its possible. Trump, who has admitted to his own sexual infidelities, is
reportedly now being advised by Ailes. Trump has called Bill Clinton the
worst abuser of women in the history of politics, and said that his sex
scandals are fair game. Voters may or may not be swayed by the the
exhumation of such arguments, this time around. But the unending scandals of
the scandalmongers have made one thing clear: neither party has a lock on
virtue.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
