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Old 11.07.2006, 07:50 PM   #8
Intellivision
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October 30, 2006


AILES ON ARMAGEDDON

From today's New York Daily News...
"Fox News chief Roger Ailes says in David Friend's new 9/11 book, Watching the World Change that 'When the end of the world comes, we'll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out.' But who'll be around to to check the Nielsens?"
I detailed this passage, in full, in my October 4 entry:
For a section on 9/11’s impact on television, I interviewed Roger Ailes, head of FOX News, which celebrates its 10th anniversary today. What was the significance, I asked him, of two billion people being able to watch the same thing at the same time on September 11? His response was somewhat chilling. The passage:
“There were deeper and more disturbing repercussions, geopolitically and, to many, spiritually [about so many people watching the events simultaneously]. ‘The implications from a television standpoint,’ says Roger Ailes, chairman of FOX News and FOX Television Stations, ‘are simply that: When the end of the world comes, we’ll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out. I believe I mean it literally. If you can witness something like [9/11] by two billion people, live, then there’s nothing that can’t be covered. And if we get into a world war, with nuclear weapons, I assume we’ll be covering it live.’
“Ailes, recognizing TV’s corporeal-world role, as it were, at the right hand of omniscience, speaks with a preacher’s reassurance and without an iota of irony when pondering the ultimate news story – a real-time Apocalypse Now: ‘It’s horrifying to think about. But maybe God set it up that way. You can either figure out how to live in freedom…and hope, or you can watch yourselves burn to death. Nine-eleven is a warning shot that says: Look, this can go either way. It’s your choice, folks.”
The religious implications of his statements were profound. Many Americans (I would go so far as to say a not insignificant portion of FOX News’s viewership) believe that the current battle against Islamist extremism and the wider conflict in Middle East somehow presage the coming of the End Times, when a global Savior will emerge out of the apocalyptic violence.
Not quite believing my ears, I was careful to ask him if he was discussing real-time coverage of a nuclear war in a figurative or literal way. Did he really mean that in the worst of worst-case scenarios, we’d be watching the End, live, on television? His response: “I believe I mean it literally.”
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