Letter to Fox News Employees from the Boss: “The McCarthy Era.”
From 2013.
Roger Ailes heads Fox News. Here is an extract from his letter.
“The recent news about the FBI’s seizure of the phone and email records of Fox News employees, including James Rosen, calls into question whether the federal government is meeting its constitutional obligation to preserve and protect a free press in the United States. We reject the government’s efforts to criminalize the pursuit of investigative journalism and falsely characterize a Fox News reporter to a Federal judge as a “co-conspirator” in a crime. I know how concerned you are because so many of you have asked me: why should the government make me afraid to use a work phone or email account to gather news or even call a friend or family member? Well, they shouldn’t have done it. The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.”
I find it curious that he should invoke “the McCarthy era.” What press intimidation was there in “the McCarthy era”? Senator McCarthy said there were Communists in the U.S. government. There were. Journalist M. Stanton Evans has covered this at length in his revisionist book on McCarthy, Blacklisted by History.
The Left successfully tagged Senator Joseph McCarthy’s warnings about this as “McCarthyism.” So successful was this media campaign that we find the conservative head of a TV network referring to “the McCarthy era” as if there had been a well-organized effort by McCarthy to suppress the media by means of government power.
Why not identify the practice as having been widespread in “the Lincoln era”? That would be accurate. Also accurate: “the Wilson era.” Surely it applies to “the LBJ era.” I am willing to accept it as applicable in “the Nixon era.” But, no, that would not do. It had to be “the McCarthy era.” This is pandering to the liberal media.
I think it is a good idea to avoid pandering to the liberal media.
Continue reading on foxnews.com.
_____________________________
Posted on May 29, 2013. The original is here.