Did Donald Trump Blackmail Roger Ailes to Flip on How FOX Covered Him?

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At least six women have come forward alleging that FOX News CEO Roger Ailes sexually harassed them. " For example, Kellie Boyle said Ailes once told her "If you want to play with the big boys you have to lay with the big boys" back in 1989. Really loathsome stuff. Ailes is already being sued by former employee Gretchen Carlson for sexual harassment.

Early in 2016 FOX was backing Marco Rubio in a very blatant manner. Even though Rubio was performing poorly he was being pushed hard by FOX. By early March that had changed and there were reports that Roger Ailes declared that "We can't do the Rubio thing anymore." This is a tacit admission that up until that point they were "doing the Rubio thing."

They still went after Trump though, so much so that he skipped a FOX news GOP debate because Trump felt that FOX in general and Megan Kelley in particular were treating him unfairly. That changed by mid-April, dramatically, after Kelley visited with Trump in Trump tower and Trump had a private lunch with Roger Ailes.

After that, it was like a switch had been flipped. Suddenly the network which had been relentlessly anti-Trump was giving him favorable coverage around the clock. So obvious was the bias that by May, less than a month later, rival Ted Cruz complained that "Ruppert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have turned FOX News into the Donald Trump Network."

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the dots here. I hypothesize that Trump had the goods on Ailes. Just like he threatened to "spill the beans" on Heidi Cruz, he threatened to do the same to Roger Ailes. Only Trump had enough beans on Ailes to ruin him, not simply embarrass him as he had done to Mrs. Cruz.

None of what I have written so far is the important part. Please do not focus on the salacious details of what I have written above to the detriment of missing the important point here: We think we are making informed choices as to who leads us, but when our information comes from a few centralized and  interconnected sources then the choices we make are not informed. They are mis-informed. The conservative movement in the United States is largely informed by FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, and a couple of nationally syndicated talk radio talk show hosts. Limbaugh is almost as connected to Alies as FOX. Of course those kinds of conservatives are losing the battle for the government and the culture in this nation. When people get their information from a source which changes the narrative on a dime in order to cover up the misdeeds of the guy running it, they are going to be mis-informed.

FOX News was never the "conservative" media in America. They only pretended to be because local and regional media stars were starting to pop up spontaneously all across the nation in the 1980s. The system had to start a fake national news network to "represent" them or a real one would eventually form. By creating FOX they filled the niche and prevented the legitimate sources from filling it instead.

My answer to better media is the same as my answer for better government- decentralize everything. There should not be a single conservative channel, there should be a dozen of them. If the "conservatives" you listen too live more than a state or two away from you, try to find one closer to home. We have to get America to stop looking to New York and Washington D.C. to find out what is happening and what it means. The Establishment Media does not exist to inform the public. It exists to protect The Establishment.