03/18/2015
Yesterday, in Mickey Kaus Quits DAILY CALLER–Bookmark Kausfiles.com, I explained how Tucker Carlson depublished a Fox-bashing column by Mickey Kaus because Carlson said "We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there."I also suggested that you bookmark Kausfiles.com, which has historically forwarded you to wherever Kaus was actually working. He also has a URL called Kausfile.com (singular) which he used during his Senate protest candidacy in 2010. He’s using that to publish his column that Tucker Carlson didn’t want:
Fox Makes it Easy for Amnesty https://t.co/uspznoqdZF
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) March 18, 2015
Here’s an excerpt:
Briefly, Fox acted like ISIS was the Greatest Threat Ever, but immigration wasn’t even an issue. This is bad. Conservatives expect CBS, NBC and ABC to betray their country on any issue, but are blindsided when Fox does it.[Note: I posted this on Daily Caller. They took it down, saying I couldn’t “trash Fox” on their site. I quit Daily Caller. Reposting the item here without changes.]
Axelrod’s Wish: 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]
Four years later, Axelrod may be getting his wish. Most of the mainstream broadcast and cable networks avoided giving excessive coverage to the recent congressional fight over the Department of Homeland Security, which was all about Republicans trying to block Obama’s executive amnesty by attaching restrictions to DHS funding. NBC Nightly News went a step further and avoided mentioning the immigration issue even when covering the funding fight — treating the threat of a DHS shutdown as if it were some sort of out-of-the-blue natural disaster.
But it’s one thing for Dem-friendly NBC to go to bat for Obama’s causes. It’s another if Fox does it too. Fox is supposed to be the feisty opposition network. You’d think it would wage a rousing campaign against Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which are surely wildly unpopular among its viewers, both because of their ends (de facto legalizing of illegals) and their means (presidential overreach).
You’d think that. But you would be wrong.
Fox didn’t editorialize in favor of Obama. It just covered other issues.
More on Axelrod and Fox:
The main significance of Fox’s immigration tamp-down, though, was as a precedent — a dry run for how Murdoch’s network might ease the way for a legislative amnesty down the road (especially if, as is quite possible, the courts void Obama’s executive actions). If Fox gets away with it this time, there will be no opposition news network next time either.P.S.: Whom to blame? It’s tempting to be sophisticated and point a finger at young FOX producer types who might be doing what they think the boss wants (as opposed to what the audience wants). That sort of thing happens in large organizations — the nervous aides are more autocratic and intolerant than the CEO. My sense, though, is that FOX is a pretty tightly run outfit. It’s run by the man who built it, Roger Ailes.
That seems to be Rupert Murdoch’s judgment. Remember Axelrod’s anecdote — the one where he lobbies Murdoch to do what has now been done. I didn’t tell you how it ends. Here is how it ends:
Murdoch shrugged. “You’ll have to talk to Roger about that.”
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.