After decades of grappling with her relationship with former President Bill Clinton and the ensuing media delirium, Monica Lewinsky is bidding goodbye to Roger Ailes, a man who shamelessly capitalise on the scandal.
Or, rather than mentioning goodbye to Ailes himself, Lewinsky is saying goodbye( and good riddance) to the atmosphere he created. As she wrote in a Monday column for the New York Times:” This is not another obituary for Roger Ailes, who died last week a year after being ousted at Fox News. It is, I hope, instead an obituary for the culture he purveyed — a culture that affected me profoundly and personally .”
Lewinsky outlines the lane that Ailes’ success build Fox News into the cable juggernaut it is today was closely tied to the sensationalization and 24/7 coverage of her most painful public minutes. She writes 😛 TAGEND
Just two years after Rupert Murdoch appointed Mr. Ailes to head the new cable news network, my relationship with President Bill Clinton became public. Mr. Ailes, a former Republican political spy, took the story of the affair and the trial that followed and made certain his anchors hammered it continuously, 24 hours a day.
It ran like sorcery: The tale hooked spectators and constructed them Fox loyalists. For the past 15 times, Fox News has been the No. 1 news station; last year the network constructed $2.3 billion.
Some experts have noted that spectators received Fox for the first time because of the crisis. John Moody, a Fox executive editor, reflected on that interval:” The Lewinsky saga threw us on the news map .” As he threw it in another interview:” Monica was a news channel’s dreaming come true .”
Their dream was my nightmare. My character, my lookings and “peoples lives” were picked apart mercilessly. Truth and fiction mixed at random in the service of higher ratings. My family and I huddled at home, worried about my going to jail — I was the original target of Ken Starr’s investigation, threatened with 27 times for having been accused of signing a false affidavit, stymie justice, suborning perjury and other misdemeanours — or worse, me taking my own life. Meantime, Mr. Ailes huddled with his employees at Fox News, dictating a lineup of talking heads to best exploit this personal and national tragedy.
Lewinsky is a known fact that every network relentlessly covered her tale — after all, it was a sexuality scandal and it involved the president of the United States. In 1998 and into 1999 , no national news story loomed larger. Nonetheless, the nature of Fox News’ coverage felt different to Lewinsky, as though there was ” no rumor was too unsubstantiated , no innuendo too vile and no accusation too abhorrent .”
After 20 years of running the network, Ailes was ousted from Fox News last summer amid accusations of sexual harassment. Since July 2016, when Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit alleging Ailes had sexually harassed her, nine more ladies, including Megyn Kelly and Andrea Tantaros, have come forward with allegations regarding harassment.
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Lewinsky points out the karmic incongruity of this turn of events in her column.
