Jayson Blair mentor and fired New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines has written yet another fishing-metaphor-themed autobiography: "The One that Got Away." YAWN. Are you asleep yet? No? Well, in a desperate bid to seem relevant, Raines has embraced the first rule of PR for Losers: attack your betters in the hope that you'll be noticed, if only for attacking them. So surprise, surprise, Raines takes on Fox News, its viewers, and its leader, Roger Ailes, with invective as nasty as it is false. NewsBusters reports:
...Raines is still rising to the conservative-bashing bait.
On page 189, he lets fly with thoughts about liberal bugbear Fox News:
“Fox, by its mere existence, undercuts the argument that the public is starved for ‘fair’ news, and not just because Fox shills for the Republican Party and panders to the latest of America’s periodic religious manias. The key to understanding Fox News is to grasp the anomalous fact that its consumers know its ‘news’ is made up. It matters not when critics point this out to Foxite consumers because they’ve understood it from the outset. That’s why they’re there. Its chief fictioneer, Roger Ailes, had been making up news in plain sight for a half century.”
He puts down his fishing rod and picks up his brass knuckles to go after Fox again on page 242:
“Fox Television showed us the future -- outright lies and paranoid opinions packaged as news under the oversight of Rupert [Murdoch], a flagrant pirate, and Roger Ailes, an unprincipled Nixon thug who had assumed a journalistic disguise in much the same way that the intergalactic insect in Men in Black shrugged into the borrowed skin of a hapless hillbilly.”
My, my. There are certainly a lot of "outright lies and paranoid opinions" flying around, but they're not at or on Fox News: they're inside Raines' head and in his book. This is Psych 101 material: Raines is angry about being an irrelevant and embittered has-been with not much more to his legacy than being remembered as Jayson Blair's protector and protege, for his old politically correct ravings about Augusta National Golf Club's membership policies, and a pathetic Wikipedia writeup documenting his embarassing and multifocal professional failures, so he's lashing out. And there's a reason Raines has ample leisure time to sit at home and polish his nasty outright falsehoods about FNC, its founders and fans: he was fired from the Times for his staggering ineptitude and his willful disregard for anything even remotely resembling facts or responsible journalism.
So now it's just Howell Raines and his fishing rod, casting wildly into the void that is the public's regard for him, hoping to hook something, anything that will make him look like anything but the washed-up curmudgeon that he is. But for all Raines' devotion to the fly-fishing theme, he still hasn't grasped that in order to catch something, you have to bait your hook with something sturdy and real. Raines has baited his hook with garbage and lies. It's no wonder nobody's biting.
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» Jayson Blair's mentor Howell Raines, writing his own fiction
