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znModeratorThe same sentiment has not been shared publicly about Mannion. Last year, Mannion came in to replace an injured Goff and did not impress whatsoever.
Of course not…you don’t do that. That would be creating a qb controversy. The focus when it comes to the press is Goff as the starter and as the #1 pick and the guy they traded up for. There would be something wrong with lavishing the same level of praise on Mannion (assuming it’s deserved).
But, no, IF (big if) Goff struggles they would be wrongheaded not to bench him. The RamsWire blogitorial did not change my mind about that. In fact I think the blogitorialist just has a blindspot when it comes to Mannion.
Either way, it is good to know Mannion is coming along, because as you say, if Jared gets hurt, then, it’s nice to know they have something viable in Sean.
It would make sense for Mannion to be showing something in his 3rd year since he came from a pro system, which put him ahead of Goff in terms of development.
IF, however, the blogitorialist’s assumption that Mannion isn;t any good is correct(and I don’t buy that), then, the Rams would have been wrong not to open up competition at the #2 spot. They’re not even bothering with that. It’s Goff, Mannion, and camp arms.
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May 18, 2017 at 11:39 pm in reply to: Rams Inglewood stadium delayed 1 year. New ETA 2020 (el nino) #69015znModeratorBonsignore: Stadium delay for Chargers, Rams not ideal, but also not a big deal
VINCENT BONSIGNORE
link: http://www.ocregister.com/2017/05/18/79352/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Apparently it does rain in Southern California.
And the record-breaking rainfall that besieged Los Angeles from November to February means the Rams and Chargers will have to wait at least one more year before they can mutually christen the $2.6 billion stadium in Inglewood they’ll eventually call home.
In the whole scheme of things, it’s more of a frustrating annoyance rather than fist-clenching letdown.
Yes, the two teams will take financial hits having to play one more year at their temporary digs rather than their luxurious new home. Which means revenue streams they were counting on tapping into won’t be available, even while they begin payments on the $500 million relocation fees they owe to fellow owners.
And certainly Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who is footing the bill for the stadium, will incur additional costs with the timeline getting pushed back a year. But as one of the most successful and wealthiest land developers in the world, that’s pretty much a daily risk for Kroenke.As for Los Angeles, there is a chance we will will miss out on the 2021 Super Bowl the NFL promised us last May. By rule, a new stadium has to be up and running at least two seasons to be eligible to host a Super Bowl, and the new timeline obviously eliminates that possibility.
The Rams are expected to ask for a waiver on the rule, and logic suggests owners will grant it provided everything goes smoothly from here on out.
But there’s also a chance they won’t.
Either way, you can expect Los Angeles to be a mainstay in the Super Bowl rotation. If it’s not 2021, you can bet 2022 will be in play.
In other words, the delay is a temporary irritation when weighed against the bigger objective.
“And that’s making sure we do this right,” Rams vice president Kevin Demoff said. “The objective is to deliver a world-class venue. Not reach a timeline if it means trying to rush things.”
The world-class venue is what the Rams pledged two years ago upon setting their sights on returning home after spending the previous 21 years in St. Louis. And a world-class venue we will still get. Just a little later than expected.
It’s a promise the Rams didn’t just make to Los Angeles, but also their NFL colleagues eager to get back to L.A. after the two-decade lapse. Kroenke sold fellow owners on the multi-purpose mega-development he envisioned across 300 acres in Inglewood – an NFL Disneyland, if you will – and that vision helped secure the necessary votes for relocation.
At the time, the Rams were involved in a three-team race to Los Angeles with their Inglewood stadium pitted against the joint stadium bid by the Chargers and Oakland Raiders in nearby Carson. Kroenke’s grand dream, and his financial wherewithal to make it happen, were the deciding factors in the Rams winning the day. As everyone congratulated each other on that fateful night in Houston – with Chargers owner Dean Spanos contemplating and ultimately pulling the trigger on his option to join the Rams in L.A. – the grand opening was slated for the 2019 season.
It’s California, everyone agreed. You can build year-round. No worries.
But who could have figured Mother Nature unleashing the kind of rain it did between the tail end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017?
Developers actually wrote 30 days of rain delays into the original 2019 timeline. And even that number seemed high to locals accustomed to mostly year-round sunshine.
So imagine everyone’s surprise when the first few months of construction were marred by nearly 60 days of weather delays.
The rain was great for the environment, but not so good when you’re trying to build a football stadium that, in order to avoid radar issues with airplanes flying into nearby LAX, needed to be built into a 90-foot hole dug into the earth.
“You have to go all the way down before you can come up,” said Dale Koger the Legends Project Development vice president overseeing the Inglewood project.
And while construction began last November with more than 100 workers digging the required hole and moving more than six million cubic yards of dirt across the construction site, the ensuing rain halted any other work and resulted in nearly two full months of delays.
Not to mention routinely transformed the hole they were digging into Lake Michigan West. That water, incidentally, had to be dealt with. And that took time.
Theoretically, the Rams and their partners could have forged ahead trying to reach the 2019 target date. And maybe even met it.
Instead, they opted for prudence over pride.
The delay not only eliminates any risk resulting in ramping up the pace to meet the original deadline, it also creates built-in accommodations for any potential future delays.
By deciding to apply the brakes now, they’ve set a realistic finish line they should easily cross rather than sprinting to a target they might ultimately fall short of.
“The worst thing you can do is get a year and a half in and then say, ‘we can’t get there’ and then tell people it’s because we lost three months to rain in 2017,” Demoff said. “Their response would have been: ‘Why didn’t you just announce the delay then?’”
That means the Rams spending one extra year at the Coliseum – a potential they accounted for by adding a 2019 option year to their original agreement with the Coliseum – and the Chargers playing one more year at StubHub Center in Carson.
Not ideal, obviously.
But much better than getting into 2018 and then taking a big, worrisome gulp knowing you might not be finished in time for kick off the following fall.
There’s some potential upside, too.
If you’re the Chargers, you get one more year acclimating and marketing yourself in Los Angeles – while playing in a 30,000-seat venue – before making the move to the much larger stadium in Inglewood.
That means one more year to entice local fans onto your bandwagon and season-ticket customer list for the new stadium.
“Our focus is always on the fan experience,” said A.G. Spanos, the Chargers’ president of business operations. “Our future home will be the best stadium in the NFL and deliver a transformational experience for Chargers fans. If getting it right means pushing back the completion date, then I think the extra year is well worth it.
“Construction is our family business, so we understand the challenges that come with a project of this magnitude. At StubHub Center we are creating an unparalleled environment for watching NFL football, and considering that no other venue in the league brings you closer to the action, we think Chargers fans will enjoy our three years in Carson.”
As for the Rams, if new coach Sean McVay and young quarterback Jared Goff use the longer runway to soar into the new stadium in 2020, will Rams fans really care if take off was delayed by a year?
Is it ideal? No. But in the grand scheme of things, a minor bump in the road.
May 18, 2017 at 10:57 pm in reply to: Rams Inglewood stadium delayed 1 year. New ETA 2020 (el nino) #69014znModeratorDemoff, Koger Talk Updated Timeline of L.A. Stadium
By Myles Simmons
While this winter’s record-setting rainfall may have benefited the Southern California region, it has led to a delay in the opening of the Los Angeles Stadium and Entertainment District at Hollywood Park. The project is now slated to be complete in mid-2020, with the Rams playing their first season there that year.
“Obviously it’s a disappointment when you’ve been working on something every day,” Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff said on a conference call Thursday afternoon. “But our organization has always taken the long-term approach on the Los Angeles project. And this is important to get right.”
Demoff mentioned the vision of Rams Owner and Chairman E. Stanley Kroenke as the main reason to push back the opening date. According to Demoff, that vision has three main factors — that the project is world class, of the highest quality, and a game changer for the way stadiums and sports districts interact.
“What would be a bigger disappointment than pushing back a year is failing to deliver on that vision,” Demoff said. “Stan’s vision is unique and I think it’s an unbelievable responsibility for all of us who work on this project to make sure we deliver that for him, for fans, for Angelenos, for the NFL, and for the world when you talk about an event, potentially, like the 2024 Olympics. It’s much more important to get it right than to make sure you hit a certain date.”
To that end, Legends project development S.V.P. and managing director Dale Koger explained on the call the heavy rains Los Angeles faced the first few months of the year delayed the project enough so that it might not be complete by the 2019 NFL season.
This created a significant challenge, as it came right in the process of digging the 90-foot deep hole for the stadium’s playing field.
“As you’re digging this hole, and you’re 70 feet in the ground on the way to 90, when it rains there’s literally nowhere for the rain to go,” Koger said. “So if it rains on a Monday and Tuesday, you really end up missing Monday, Tuesday, probably Wednesday, probably Thursday. And there was a time — at the peak of it — that we had 12 to 15 feet of water in the hole.”
Koger said the research the development team had done “indicated that we should anticipate no more than about 30 rain days in the entire 36 months or so of construction. And we encountered almost double that in two months.”
In some ways, the issue was compounded because the stadium will host two clubs and as such will be used for at least 20 weeks in the NFL season.
“When you consider the fact that it’s a two-team facility, it’s not like the Rams could petition the league and say, ‘Let’s play our first few weeks away from home while we make up the schedule,’” Koger said.
And so instead, the stadium is slated to open with a string of events that would lead up to the 2020 preseason. Demoff said the logical timetable for opening is around early summer with something like a soccer exhibition or concert. And those events typically start in May.
“What this allows is the first time we host an event that people will be able to walk onto a sports and entertainment district that is unparalleled in the world and exceeds, hopefully, everybody’s standards for what they expect from and entertainment and sports district,” Demoff said. “We’re targeting May, June to bring events in ahead of the schedule, ahead of the preseason to really take advantage of that summer event series. And I think that’s when you’ll see the building come to life.”
“One of the benefits of the 2020 schedule is we now have a more conventional schedule for an NFL stadium that could, in fact, accommodate some unforeseen situations,” Koger said.
But it’s the rain and only the rain that impacted this new timeline. As Demoff said on Thursday, the stadium designers worked with the Federal Aviation Administration on how deep into the ground the field would be set, eliminating any issues there. And Demoff said frankly, “Economics were not a factor in this decision, whatsoever.
“This decision was based on delivering a world-class stadium at the highest quality possible,” he continued. “And that was the only basis of this decision.”
Since breaking ground in November, there has been plenty of ongoing work at the site. Koger said in spite of the rain, the mass excavation of up to 6,000,000 cubic yards of dirt for the stadium itself is complete. Koger added the foundation to support the project’s roof is 97 percent complete, and the foundation to support the stadium bowl is 95 percent complete.
“There are hundreds of workers on the site each day,” Demoff said. “The jobs that we’ve created on the construction project will impact Inglewood and will provide them revenue through this period as well.”
There are, of course, some consequences to moving the timeline. Demoff said personal seat licenses are still slated to begin going on sale in the fall in conjunction with the Chargers — nothing changes on that front. But the project will now require a waiver from the NFL to host Super Bowl LV. League rules currently stipulate a that a stadium cannot host a Super Bowl in its inaugural season.
Demoff said the likelihood of receiving a waiver is a better question for the league. But with two teams sharing the stadium, the Inglewood project does have some advantages.
“I think the reason for the two-year process is it gives the NFL the chance to go through 20 games to perfect how they want to run a Super Bowl,” Demoff said. “We have the unique advantage that we will have 20 NFL games in our building in 2020 — the same amount as a normal team would have over two years. We’ll have events in the summer. We will have the requisite number of events.
“But, obviously, this is the NFL’s decision. It’s a showcase game and they will want to make sure that it’s a great building for the Super Bowl. And we want to make sure that’s a great building for the Super Bowl,” Demoff continued. “And that’s a conversation we need to have over the next few years.”
Moving the timeline back also means the Rams will play in the Coliseum for an extra year. That stadium is already undergoing a renovation process — with new scoreboards in place this season — scheduled to be complete in 2019.
But NFL rules also currently stipulate that a team in a temporary stadium must play in the NFL’s international series. Demoff said there was always a chance the Rams could play an international game in 2019 or 2020 anyway, given that they’re scheduled to host a Super Bowl.
And finally — uniforms. Demoff said the Rams have already begun the two-year process of rebranding with the NFL and Nike. That means the club will have the choice of either changing their uniforms for the 2019 season or in 2020 to coincide with the opening of the stadium.
“That’s a decision we’ll make in the coming months as we look at uniforms,” Demoff said.
znModeratorHow I Met Roger Ailes, Political and Sexual Predator
Media critic Jeff Cohen and Paul Jay discuss the critical role Roger Ailes played in creating Fox News and Presidents Bush and Trump; Ailes died today at age 77
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=19129
How I Met Roger Ailes, Political and Sexual PredatorPAUL JAY: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. Roger Ailes, a political and sexual predator, died today at the age of 77. The leader of Fox News, Ailes played a critical role in building the political power of the extreme right. AP reports that Democrats had an 82-seat House majority when Fox News was launched in 1996. Republicans now have a 45-seat majority, a swing of 127 seats. It’s far worse for Democrats in state houses across the country, where they’ve lost more than 900 seats since 2009. The GOP has total control of government in at least 25 states and partial control in 20 others.
Of course, the policies of corporate Democrats that helped the greatest wealth gap in history had more to do with the Republican victories than Fox, but Ailes’s influence should not be underestimated. I met Ailes once, when he came into our studio space at the Democratic Party convention. He came in, put his arm around me, and smiled for the camera. I couldn’t believe he knew the Real News or me, and as it turned out, he was just mugging for a documentary film crew that was following him around. It was truly the most bizarre moment of the convention, that is, until the next, even more bizarre thing happened. After shaking my hand, Ailes walked over to one of my female colleagues, put his hand on her shoulder. He looked at me, winked, and said, “Be sure to take of your ladies.”
This was only weeks after he’d been fired for being a sexual predator at Fox. The arrogance and complete lack of inhibition of the man, who lived drunk on money and power, was truly amazing. Ailes might have believed the dangerous political nonsense his station peddled, but he believed in something more. Ailes is quoted as saying, “People think I stayed in politics because I wanted conservatives to run the world,” he said to the New York Times in 1995. “Actually, it was the money.” That likely sums up the real money for Fox News and its hosts. It’s about the money, and how much damage they do to the American people is quite besides the point.
Now joining us to discuss the significance of Roger Ailes’s life and work is Jeff Cohen. Jeff is a media critic and lecturer, and founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, where he’s an associate professor of journalism. He’s the author of many books, including Cable News Confidential, My Misadventures in Corporate Media. Jeff has been a TV commentator on CNN and Fox News, MSNBC, and was senior producer of MSNBC’s Phil Donahue primetime show until it was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion. Jeff is the co-founder of the online activist organization rootsaction.org, and he joins us from Woodstock, New York. Thanks for joining us, Jeff.
JEFF COHEN: Great to be with you, Paul.
PAUL JAY: You were in this business. A lot of your time in corporate news was during that Roger Ailes era. What do you make of just what he did in terms of shaping American politics and American media?
JEFF COHEN: I don’t think there’s an individual that I can think of who had more impact on U.S. politics in the last 20 years than Roger Ailes. He was a key force in building the right wing of the Republican Party and continuing to push the Republican Party to the right. You often hear people erroneously compare, “Well, we have Fox News on the right, and we have MSNBC on the left,” which is laughable because Fox News has continuously pushed the right wing of the Republican Party and tried to get the right wing to replace the more moderate Republicans. On the other hand, MSNBC, after we saw during the Bernie versus Hillary months, or Edward Snowden being hounded by Obama, that at MSNBC they boost the middle, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. They’re not interested in giving voice to progressive movements, progressive candidates, changing the Democratic Party from a moderate, corporate, centrist party to a progressive one. That parallel leaves me cold.
Roger Ailes has had a huge impact. He was a genius as a propagandist. He was brilliant at the 30-second attack ads. He almost was the genius of 30-second attack ads. When Rupert Murdoch decides he’s going to start a “news channel,” I think in Murdoch’s mind, he thinks, “If Roger Ailes can accomplish this much in a 30-second attack ad at a Democrat or a liberal, imagine what he can do 24-7 with a TV channel.”
PAUL JAY: Jeff, you were the producer of the Phil Donahue Show just in the weeks leading up to the Iraq War. To me, if there’s two major crimes of Ailes, one is how he helped prepare conditions for the Iraq War, and we’ll get to the next one, which is climate change or climate change denial. I think it’s interesting what happened. You produced the Phil Donahue Show, which starts to critique the American buildup for the war, and the show gets canceled. Roger Ailes beats the drums for war and goes on to great success.
JEFF COHEN: Yeah, there’s no doubt, and it’s not just Ailes. Ailes was brilliant with Fox News, but every news outlet that Rupert Murdoch owned in England and the U.S. was instrumental in beating the drums for war. I was there at Fox News at the time of 9/11 and when the drums first started getting beaten for it’s not just enough to go after Afghanistan. Here are the other countries we’ve got to take on. Fox News has been brilliant.
Roger Ailes, you might remember, came into politics through Richard Nixon. When he was in the Nixon White House, he played some sort of role with a memo how to put the GOP on TV. His goal always has been how to use the propaganda potential of television on behalf of the right wing, and he did it brilliantly as a political consultant for Nixon, for Ronald Reagan, for George Bush the first. Remember, Roger Ailes played a key role in the racist 1988 Willy Horton campaign. It was Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater who masterminded that very racist campaign against Dukakis, the Democratic candidate.
When he has 24-7 to push right-wing propaganda, he was called the news chairman at Fox News. Of course, Roger Ailes had no experience as a journalist. He was a propagandist. He was a guy who designed ads. He becomes the news chairman of Fox News, and he has one goal in mind besides earning a big profit, which they did, and that’s how do we build up the right wing. We build up the right wing by fear. Roger Ailes, and television itself is a medium that’s very good at throwing fear. In my view, when I say he’s at least as important as any single individual in American politics in the last 20 years, I can’t imagine there being a President Trump without there having been a Roger Ailes and Fox News.
PAUL JAY: George Bush the second said he probably wouldn’t have been president without Roger Ailes. He said that today.
JEFF COHEN: No doubt, but I think that Trump is more of an Ailes candidate. Keep in mind that when I was at Fox News the first five years I was on the air, I got to know Fox News viewers. They are not intellectual. They are not well read, but they are ardent voters. Ailes had millions of voters. He had a lot of impact, especially, in off-year elections.
The worldview that Roger Ailes and Fox News put forward is that the people who are getting the best of us are rich racial minorities, women, foreigners, immigrants, terrorists, and they’re getting the best of white males. They’re getting the best of our depleted U.S. military. They’re getting the best of our beleaguered big corporations, who at Fox News of course are called job creators. He was able to create this upside-down worldview that millions of Trump supporters believe today.
PAUL JAY: He comes from this school. You connect Lee Atwater. In the beginning I said a political and sexual predator. A lot of the news today about his death is talking about him as a sexual predator, but Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, and Ailes, who all were operatives for various Republican presidential candidates, they’re really from the Goebbels school of propaganda, which is tell a lie, and keep it telling it, and then when it’s countered, tell another lie to counter that. It proved to be very successful.
Then you take that to the scale of a television network with Murdoch money behind it. It becomes enormously influential. You run into people … For example, climate change, maybe even more damaging in the long run, the role Fox and Ailes have played in climate change denial or climate crisis denial. You run into people. We go to Dundalk near Baltimore and talk to people about climate change, and you’re told, “Climate change is just a conspiracy of the government to raise taxes,” and so on and so on, which they’re getting from Fox. The influence and the damage that they’ve done is quite profound.
JEFF COHEN: It’s hoax after hoax. You’re right. The war on Christmas. It’s basically a Fox News channel concoction. The irony is, the one time I ever met Roger Ailes was at a Fox News channel holiday party. The invitation didn’t say Christmas party. It said holiday party. That didn’t mean that Fox News was anti-Christmas or anti-Christian, but we’ve heard that year after year after year. They’ve been wrong about Planned Parenthood. Fox News helped put ACORN out of business with this series of hoax and crazily edited, deceptively edited videotapes. You mentioned the Iraq invasion.
Fox News has got diehard viewers. They swear by Fox News. These people are active, and they don’t miss an election. The importance of Ailes is helping the right wing within the Republican Party continue to ascend and helping recruit millions of voters who will push the right wing of the Republican Party not just against Democrats but against moderate or establishment Republicans.
I watch Fox News every night. I do it so you don’t have to. They are not friendly to Paul Ryan. They are not friendly to Mitch McConnell. A lot of the Fox News hosts see those people as vacillating moderates.
PAUL JAY: I think it’s very important that there couldn’t have been an Ailes, I think, or a Fox News with such success, if mainstream, quote unquote, corporate media weren’t such essentially defenders of the status quo. One thing Fox did, in their own warped way, is they made systemic criticism. They reflected the rage so many people have about how unjust the society is. The rage against government, in its own, is legitimate because government on the whole is controlled by the billionaire class, if you want to use Sanders language, or corporations and the elites.
When mainstream news is so detached from the emotion of the alienation of so many people in the county, and there’s always this thing in mainstream news that the system will self-correct. Here’s something really bad here, but don’t worry, because we just exposed it and now it will be okay. Go back to sleep and watch our entertainment programming. At least Fox was angry and had an edge, and as a result felt authentic, even though it’s completely deceptive.
JEFF COHEN: You’re right. There’s anger in the land, and Fox News was brilliant at tapping into it and misdirecting it. Fox News, it’s almost unconstitutional at Fox News to take on big corporations unless it’s Hollywood. You’ve got to misdirect that anger toward immigrants or welfare recipients or Black Lives Matter or Jesse Jackson. I could go through dozens of who were the villains, the new Black Panther Party that almost no one had ever heard of. They’ve always had villains. They’ve always had someone to blame at Fox News. Television is a medium that lends itself toward attack, and if you’re defending the system, as CNN tends to do and the mainstream broadcast networks tends to do and public broadcasting tends to do, you’re cutting against television.
Roger Ailes didn’t understand journalism. He understood the medium, that it’s an emotional medium. When people are angry, you have to do something with that anger. Ailes knew exactly what to do with that anger, which was to make sure it’s not directed against the powers that be, but it’s directed against the people below. Those are the ones to blame.
PAUL JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Jeff.
JEFF COHEN: Thank you.
PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.znModeratorThe only way Mannion plays is if Goff gets hurt.
Maybe. But I believe them when they say that if Goff struggles (for a stretch) they will replace him.
It’s nice to have 2 qbs.
znModeratorI think Tavon is best used the way he was in 2015. So far I don’t see any indication from McVay that he’s interested in that.
I just wanted to add this: in saying things like that, I am not criticizing either guy. Tavon can do what he does, which to me has value, as shown by 2015. On the other hand, McVay didn’t pick TA and if he doesn’t want to work that kind of Tavony stuff into the offense, then, that’s what happens when you get a new coach.
To quote Raising Arizona, there’s what’s right and there’s what’s right and never the twain shall meet.
I know SB and others have a different view–that in fact McVay will find ways to use TA and it’s not all categorical and cut-n-dried.
.
znModeratorRoger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever
Matt Taibbi
On the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.
Chase Mitchell ✔ @ChaseMit
What did Roger Ailes die of, aside from perfect timingJosh Gondelman ✔ @joshgondelman
Roger Ailes has died. Another proud Confederate monument taken down this week. Smdh.Marc Lamont Hill ✔ @marclamonthill
Roger Ailes has died. Wow. Sending deep and heartfelt condolences to everyone who was abused, harassed, exploited, and unjustly fired by himWhen I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, “Say that you hope he’s reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia.”
Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character.
We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.
Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans’ worst fantasies about each other.
Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – “I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead,” he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.
In this sense, his Fox News broadcasts were just extended versions of the old “ring around the collar” ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence.
Ailes launched Fox in 1996 with a confused, often amateurish slate of dumb programs cranked out by cut-rate and often very young staffers. The channel was initially most famous for its overt shallowness (“More News in Less Time” was one of its early slogans) and its Monty Python-style bloopers, like the time Kathleen Sullivan read a story about a boy coming home for Christmas after surgery: “So this year, the Joneses will be able to open up their Christmas gifts – instead of little Johnny.”
But the main formula was always the political scare story, and Fox quickly learned to mix traditional sensationalist tropes like tabloid crime reporting with demonization of liberal villains like the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton in particular was a godsend for Fox. The first lady’s mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake cookies – to say nothing of the “I’m not sitting here, some little woman, saying ‘Stand By Her Man’ like Tammy Wynette” quote – were daggers to the hearts of graying middle Americans everywhere. What’s the matter, Ailes’ audiences wondered, with Tammy Wynette?
So they tuned into Fox, which made ripping Hillary and other such overeducated, cosmopolitan, family-values-hating Satans a core part of its programming.
But invective, like drugs or tobacco or any other addictive property, is a product of diminishing returns. You have to continually up the ante to get people coming back. So Ailes and Fox over the years graduated from simply hammering Democratic politicians to making increasingly outlandish claims about an ever-expanding list of enemies.
Soon the villains weren’t just in Washington, but under every rock, behind every corner. Immigrants were spilling over the borders. Grades were being denuded in schools by liberal teachers. Marriage was being expanded to gays today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly rigging vote totals.
Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle America remembered as a place where smooth-talking guys and gals smoked cigarettes, gazed into each others’ eyes and glorified small-town life and the military, now became a sandbox for over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Brangelina who used their fame to pal around with socialist dictators and lecture churchy old folks about their ignorance.
The Fox response was to hire an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing, who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy. Ingraham even derided muffin tops as evidence of America’s decaying values.
Ailes picked at all these scabs, and then when he ran out of real storylines to mine he invented some that didn’t even exist. His Fox was instrumental in helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into being, and elevated the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers to ISIS status, warning Republicans that these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were planning on bringing guns to the GOP convention.
The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn’t have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn’t limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative audiences.
Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.
So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.
The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.
Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.
What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we’re wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.
Moreover, Ailes built a financial empire waving images of the Clintons and the Obamas in front of scared conservatives. It’s no surprise that a range of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump in front of terrified Democrats.
It’s not that Trump isn’t or shouldn’t be frightening. But it’s conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides.
Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line.
And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product.
The extent to which we hate and fear each other now – that’s not any one person’s fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.
znModeratorNever mind. I saw him linked to the 9ers, which made me think they signed Toth. Sorry for my mistake.
Oh it’s okay, no big deal. Just double-checking.
I just happen to have known the real story—Toth just got hired as the head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. So I figure he couldn;t have signed with the 9ers.
znModeratorToth was signed to the 9ers roster as a UDFA.
Really? I had not seen that. You sure?
znModeratorI liked all the Star Trek captains and I am willing to give this new group of actors a shot.
It’s just that to me, the trailer hypes the thing the wrong way. I can’t even put a finger on what I am saying…the hype is just wrong.
znModeratorNoam on the antecedents to the Putin issue. Essentially he is saying Putin/russia have been surrounded by a ‘hostile military alliance’ (to use Chomsky’s words) and are reacting like a cornered animal.
Okay my vote again.
Yeah I’ve heard that line. I don’t buy it. Whatever is happening there, it’s completely mutual, and Putin is no victim.
Honestly, people could have made the same defense of Hussein. It just doesn’t hold up.
We have got to get over the idea that if somebody is anti-american, somehow he has to be defended.
That;’s not a leftist critique IMO.
znModeratorHere are the centers who at this point, so far, are now part of the OTAs/training camp 90…listed by years of experience:
Sullivan, John 6-4 310 10th year
Rhaney, Demetrius 6-2 301 4th year
Blythe, Austin 6-2 291 2nd year
Eldrenkamp, Jake 6-5 297 rookie–
And of course they cut McMeans and Toth did not get a contract. So at one point they had 5, now they have 4.
I would not rule out another addition somewhere along the line.
znModeratorFollow-up. Just another vote in the informal poll.
First, he’s wrong. It would be as much of a scandal if the other country were NOT an adversary. Think of scandals where Israel gets revealed as too bound up with this or that american official.
I found that whole report to be pretty wrong-headed. It;s a thing that keeps showing up… why is the media and why are the dems so wrong about Russia?
Needless to say you can have a view of that conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with any mainstream/DNC line.
Which is what some leftists keep missing. They act like pointing out the ways Russia is a problem is just complicit with mainstream/DNC stuff.
To me to take that line just massively misses a lot. It in itself is a mistake IMO. I generally hear that line with just massive skepticism. To me it’s just completely wrong-headed.
My view basically is, if I didn’t like Pinochet, why would I cut Putin a break. There’s no difference.
znModeratorJust out of curiosity. And minus any conflictual tension stuff or any of that. Comrade to comrade. Why would I want to know Putin’s spin? When we were chasing down info on the Iraq war, no one wanted to know Hussein’s spin…and rightly so. I actually don’t see any difference now. The way I see it, it is impossible to make a genuinely objective argument that he has a credible view or any of that. He’s a pig and one of the reasons the Russians have even less democracy than we do.
znModeratorEven if no “crime” by the President is discovered there is always the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Known as “The Pence Amendment.”
znModeratorGiven game day roster limits, Sullivan’s backup should also be able play guard if needed. Blythe played guard for Indianapolis, but not very well from what I’ve read. Not sure who else currently on the roster is going to be able to fill that role.
They could do a thing where Blythe is inactive during the week and starts only if they know in advance Sullivan will be out.
JUst thinking out loud here.
znModeratorEnh. I dunno. Looks hyped up, not really substantial.
znModeratorwhat happened with jon toth? i’m guessing he wasn’t offered a contract?
Yeah…it’s over for toth.
znModeratorI look at it, if Sullivan goes down, we are screwed. Blythe may or may not make the roster, but he was cut from the Colts, and their OLine was just as bad as ours. That says a lot about Blythe. Not real good.
I know it looks like that.
Maybe Rhaney steps up some, maybe Eldrenkamp comes through.
znModeratorWhat Are the Rams Options at Center?
Myles Simmons
Throughout the offseason, one of the biggest questions surrounding the Rams’ offense is how the unit’s line will be composed.
Los Angeles partially answered it by signing former Bengals left tackle Andrew Whitworth to anchor the line, which keeps Rodger Saffold at left guard. Head coach Sean McVay has also moved Greg Robinson and Rob Havensteinto compete at right tackle and right guard, respectively.
It’s at center where L.A. continues to bring in options with OTAs beginning next week. In early April, the Rams signed John Sullivan, who started 93 games for the Vikings from 2009-2014 before missing the 2015 season with a back injury. He served as the backup center in Washington last year, learning McVay’s offensive system.
At rookie minicamp over the weekend, McVay said Sullivan and 2014 seventh-round pick Demetrius Rhaney have been taking the majority of snaps at center so far.
While they did not draft an offensive lineman, the Rams signed Jake Eldrenkamp as a college free agent out of Washington. He saw plenty of action at center during last weekend’s rookie minicamp.
“He’s got the movement skills that we look for in a center and he’s a big guy,” offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur said.
And L.A. made another move this week, claiming former Colts center Austin Blythe on waivers. A seventh-round pick out of Iowa in the 2016 draft, Blythe appeared in eight games last season, starting the club’s Week 4 matchup against the Jaguars.
But aside from the listed centers, McVay has said offensive line coach Aaron Kromer is working to cross train interior linemen.
“I think just because you’ve got to have the season in mind when you’ve got seven, maybe eight linemen [active on gameday], if something did happen to one of those centers, typically it’s going to be [a] guard [filling in] — unless you’re going to have one of those guys that’s your sixth or seventh linemen be exclusively a center,” McVay said. “It’s important for those guards to be able to have some flexibility and be able to snap that football if some of those emergency situations dictate that.”
And so while Sullivan is likely No. 1 at the position at this point, the center competition will likely be one to monitor through OTAs and training camp.
znModeratorCenturion wrote:
About 15 years ago, I worked in a firm with John Sullivan’s late-father Rick Sullivan. As nice a guy as one could imagine.
We did not know each other too well as it was a very large firm and we were in very different departments. But we did work on the same floor and would occasionally engage in casual conversations.
My wife had a cousin who was a walk-on at Virginia Tech … a back-up fullback and special teams player. Rick Sullivan would always ask about him in a genuine and kind manner.
One Fall-day I asked what was knew and Rick explained that he had taken his son around to visit some colleges. I complemented him that it was a terrific thing when a parent can do that with a child, and asked what schools they had visited recently. Rick mentioned that they had just been to Notre Dame and Michigan; and his son loved the Notre Dame campus.
I commented that it was a great school and asked about his son’s interests. Rick said he was a ‘football player’. I stopped what I was doing and said ‘He’s a football player and he is looking at Notre Dame and Michigan?’ Rick (an average sized man) paused and almost sheepishly told me his son was 6′ 5″ and 300 lbs.
When I asked about the two schools and visits, Rick said his son really enjoyed his meetings with Tyrone Willingham and Lloyd Carr. I stopped again and said something like ‘ He met with the two head coaches … its the middle of the football season’. Rick went on to explain how is son John was an all-state wrester and high school all-American football player.
Because he was such a nice guy, Rick tried to ask me about my wife’s cousin. I said ‘The hell with him. Form now on we are talking about your son.’
znModeratorI think in addition to that, he wants to establish connections with right-wing oligarchs to smooth business all the way around.
——————-
Do you think that has often been the same goal with American Presidents ?
w
vNo. Though it would be irrelevant either way since the point here was to analyze Putin. Why deflect from that? I mean it’s not as if american presidents get a free ride around here.
Historically american presidents have had a number of complex motives driven by all sorts of things, including the paranoias first induced by the cold war and then 9/11. They didn;t invade Iraq to further connections with Russian oligarchs. During Vietnam there were no Russian oligarchs.
As you know I don’t like slogan-like “one cause” reductions.
None of which has anything to do with analyzing Putin.
.
.
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I wasnt ‘deflecting’. Thats just ‘you’ mindreading or something. I was expanding the discussion. I wasn’t leaving the Putin thing behind. One post at a time is all i can do though.AND, i disagree with you about American Presidents. I think they do ‘exactly’ what Putin is doing.
w
vPutin is an actual autocrat who rules a basically “democratic in name only” society, and he is looking to bolster like-minded people around the west.
I don’t see any american president, even the worst ones, equalling him in any of that. They’re a few steps behind him.
And even if I bought that they were alike, to me it’s a non-point. If you say “yeah but what about the USA,” I just go well add Putin to your list then of people we condemn and let’s discuss him for a while. I mean we’ve had years worth of bringing it to american presidents…that isn’t going away. One doesn’t diminish the other. I mean I might get the point of saying that to a rightie. But leftists know about the USA.
When I say something is a deflection it is aimed at the argument. The words that are stated. To me it’s aimed at what I perceive to be a form of argumentational illogic.
I have regularly condemned the worst of american policies, and IMO it doesn’t detract from that to aim the same kinds of things at Putin.
znModeratorI think in addition to that, he wants to establish connections with right-wing oligarchs to smooth business all the way around.
——————-
Do you think that has often been the same goal with American Presidents ?
w
vNo. Though it would be irrelevant either way since the point here was to analyze Putin. Why deflect from that? I mean it’s not as if american presidents get a free ride around here.
Historically american presidents have had a number of complex motives driven by all sorts of things, including the paranoias first induced by the cold war and then 9/11. They didn;t invade Iraq to further connections with Russian oligarchs. During Vietnam there were no Russian oligarchs.
As you know I don’t like slogan-like “one cause” reductions.
None of which has anything to do with analyzing Putin.
.
.
znModeratorRams are not favored in any game in 2017?
Does anyone take that seriously at this point?
.
znModeratorHe gave up eight QB pressures on 50 pass-blocking snaps
BTW that was at guard against Jax:
At right guard on Sunday, it was seventh-round pick Austin Blythe making his first NFL start. Blythe played some guard in college but had not seen any action at right guard in the preseason.
Haeg and Blythe joined fellow rookie Ryan Kelly as 3/5th of Andrew Luck’s starting line against the Jaguars.
It was a not a great afternoon for the unit.
Luck was sacked a career-high six times, as the offense could not gather any real production through the game’s first 40 minutes.
“They fought their butts off,” Luck said of the offensive line following the 30-27 loss, “but by no means was it perfect by anybody on offense.”
znModeratorPFF: RAMS CLAIM AUSTIN BLYTHE FROM THE COLTS
The 2016 seventh-rounder saw limited playing time with the Colts last season, but had strong grades in college.
MIKE CAHILL
https://www.profootballfocus.com/pro-rams-claim-austin-blythe-from-the-colts/
The Los Angeles Rams claimed Austin Blythe off waivers from the Colts to up the competition at center, which has been underwhelming in years past.
Blythe was a seventh-round pick of the Colts in 2016 after being the third-highest-graded center in the nation in 2015.
During the 2014 season, Blythe played the first seven games at center before moving to guard. Before the switch, his pass-blocking efficiency was the fifth-best, and his two QB pressures allowed were tied for second-fewest.
The Colts thrust Blythe into the starting guard slot for one game in 2016. He gave up eight QB pressures on 50 pass-blocking snaps
znModeratorAnd of course the real goal is to undermine rival powers, and enhance his own. That’s the way this works.
I think in addition to that, he wants to establish connections with right-wing oligarchs to smooth business all the way around.
So convert enemies to friends.
Meanwhile part of Putin’s paranoia stems from the fact that there are real tensions between Russia and NATO, tensions he confronts with an especially hysterical version of anti-detente.
znModerator
znModeratorIt is becoming more evident that McV places a high priority on intelligence from his players.
Yeah you can see it in the interviews too. That was my first reaction to the first interview I saw with Everett. Just a smart kid.
May 17, 2017 at 8:51 am in reply to: in spite all that was wrong last year they had an offense in 4 consecutive games #68929znModeratorWell teams must have figured them out after that, cause
it got Old-Testament-Ugly after that.w
vMy theory? It’s more that the defense gave some games away…AND they went to London…AND they tanked…AND Goff struggled…and so on. It was not one thing. Heck the move was part of it. Sullivan, in the article I posted about him, talks about what a challenge it is moving there, and he’s just one guy. Imagine an entire team plus coaches doing it.
And so on.
Etc.
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