Donald Trump upsets the Fox News apple cart

The always-entertaining Matt Taibbi has a new article where he says that Donald Trump is upsetting the business model that Fox News has created and forced them to consider treating the nutty Ben Carson as their candidate. The relationship between Trump and Fox, once so cozy and full of mutual admiration, began to fall apart following the angry exchange between Megyn Kelly and Trump.

“[Fox News Chairman] Roger [Ailes] was not happy,” a Fox source told New York Magazine. “Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.”

Neither Ailes nor Murdoch are too dense to know what this means. They know they’ve spent a generation building an audience of morons. Their business model depends on morons; morons are the raw materials of their industry, the way Budweiser is in the hops business.
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The Fox News-Donald Trump soap opera

The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump oscillates between hot and cold with remarkable rapidity. Trump was a favorite on Fox but when he was seemingly ambushed by the moderators during the first debate, he took umbrage and attacked Megyn Kelly in particular and vowed to never appear on their shows again. Fox head Roger Ailes than quickly apologized and Trump agreed to withdraw his boycott, though he continued to occasionally lob attacks at Kelly.
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Even the New York Times has realized that Republicans are nuts

The curse of the American media is that the major ones refrain from calling out stupid statements by major politicians for the nonsense they are but instead treat them as one side of a debate to be counter-balanced by an opposing view, leaving the impression that the truth lies somewhere in between. But we have entered a stage in politics where Republicans are making flat-out wrong statements that are simply not even debatable.
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What to expect from Stephen Colbert’s new show

Tonight at 11:35pm is when Stephen Colbert begins his new career as a late night talk show host. From what we can see, he is not aiming to revolutionize the format but keep it broadly similar to what been done before, the new wrinkle being that his guests would cover a wider range than just celebrities from the entertainment world, also encompassing politicians, writers, scientists, and other people of interest.
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Jorge Ramos’s side of the story

Jorge Ramos is the well-known news anchor on the Spanish language channels Univision and Fusion who was thrown out of a press conference with Donald Trump for asking questions about his immigration plans. Some commentators have criticized Ramos for not waiting his turn to be asked and said that he was being rude by ‘jumping the queue’, so to speak. Others have gone even further and cheered Trump’s action, seeing it as demonstrating Trump’s toughness and symbolic of how Trump would throw people out of the country.
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Smoking and Morton Downey, Jr.

Before Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative media outrage machine was led by abrasive talk show host Morton Downey, Jr., whose programs were a combination of Limbaugh politics and Jerry Springer format, where he would have on political guests who would be goaded to attack each other and create shouting matches, with Downey attacking the liberals and liberal views in the harshest terms. The studio audience would be raucous and conservative audiences loved it.
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To bleep or not to bleep

On broadcast TV and radio, certain words are bleeped out due to rules about decency. NPR’s Nina Totenberg makes some good points about this practice. She says that the news media (including NPR), too often cowed by in-house lawyers, sometimes goes too far and ‘cleanses’ the news. She says that it should be acceptable to quote people accurately or at least sufficiently accurately so that the informed listener knows exactly what was said.
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