Two on Roger Ailes & Fox News

 The Loudest Voice (2019)

Based on a book by Gabriel Sherman
TV mini-series on Showtime with multiple writers and directors

Bombshell (2019)
Directed by Jay Roach
Written by Charles Randolph


These are thoughts reflecting on seeing Bombshell last night and The Loudest Voice some months ago.

Given, it’s length, depth and more outside point of view, The Loudest Voice is the greater of these two projects in showing what Fox News is. There is a natural focus on Roger Ailes. Fox News is a corporate broadcasting projection of his personality, politically and beyond.

The Loudest Voice has a dynamic and convincingly terrific central performance by Russell Crowe as Ailes. We see him before Fox News was created. We see how he pulled it all off and the series goes into more depth about his right wing political allies, from Richard Nixon through to Donald Trump.
The Loudest Voice takes us through the selecting of the on-screen talent such as the casting of radio shock talk entity Sean Hannity, which elevated him to a national political pundit that people take seriously and listen to, even President Trump. We see the building of the network that becomes the highest rated in the cable news business and dominant in the political dialog of the USA. There is no doubt that Ailes knew how to appeal to the lowest in the country, the fears and greed, and channel the power of Rupert Murdoch’s international information business empire into the awesome force of right-wing propaganda that it became. Roger Ailes was a talented man in a nasty game.
The series takes us through to the eventual downfall of Ailes and shows us rather explicitly the nature of the sexual acts he coerced out of women ambitious for bigtime TV careers. He liked them to suck him off.

The series takes us through 20 years of the career of Roger Ailes. It is a detailed story of the horribly business information entity that Fox News became and sadly remains even after Ailes is gone. 
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Bombshell being just a theatrical movie and not a long one coming in at 109 minutes has a much shorter focal length. It’s all about the final year of Ailes. The story is told from the perspective of the Fox News women and the attempt led by Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidmen in this, Naomi Watts in The Loudest Voice)  to expose the sexual harassment by Roger Ailes.
Unlike The Loudest Voice, it is not an indictment of Fox News itself. We are asked to have sympathy for Gretchen Carlson who was happy to work to comply or deflect the harassment by Roger Ailes for many years and not call him on it, sue him, until she is eventually canned from the network. We could leave the movie with the impression that Fox News is not a bad entity, and not a bad place to work except for Ailes.

It depicts this, sort of, intramural battle between the right wing boss and these right wing hack women, who were ambitious and ruthless enough to go along with slimeball Roger Ailes, his needs and his broadcast tone demands up to a point. That point being, for some the main stars, no longer of use to the network and out of a job.
Ailes himself in John Lithgow’s characterisation of Roger Ailes, as a rather pathetic old man in his final year of power, might bring him more sympathy than is appropriate given his history.

It might be hard for some viewers to have total sympathy for these women even as their treatment was criminal and despicable.
You want to play in the sewer you might get shit on. 

     

The Brainwashing of my Dad

The Brainwashing of my Dad
A documentary film by Jen Sanko

This is like the big media “13th” in that there is the history laid out before us and it is a very unhappy one of power and control.
The movie is personal stories of people who have watched loved ones become very unpleasantly affected by rightwing talk radio, Fox TV News. This is combined with relevant media studies sort of information. It centers on Jen Sanko’s elderly father. His politics and demeanor changed as a result of first commuting with rightwing talk radio and then Fox News.
Many of us have watched this happen to people we know, or maybe even to ourselves, for many years. It’s sadly too familiar.

The main contributions of the film consist of the information such as the tossing out of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, which unleashed bias propaganda radio, and the Telecommunication Act in the 90s helping to further consolidate big corporate media power.

The movie also is helpful in illuminating the way rightwing media works in locking people in, practically physically, by engaging the emotions in a sustained hateful way that is exciting and oddly addicting to those who expose themselves to it. This was an outstanding section of the movie, for me anyway, already well converted to the POV of the filmmaker.

I don’t recall the film questioning the presence of this media in the home in the first place, like “CUT THE DAMN CABLE AND STOP PAYING THEM EVERY MONTH!”. But the fact is people want their cable TV, especially older ones and it has been ubiquitous for long enough to distort the whole country in it’s own image.

The movie was wrapped before the revelation of Roger Ailes sexually harassing, and more, countless women in his long career and TV, so there is none of that. He’s out, damage done.

I mean, look at this Trump character. Fox TV watcher filled with typical hate driving off the stage onto a wave of fellow brainwashees and surfing into the Whitehouse.
Party on TV people!