Sh*tshow!: The Country’s Collapsing ... And the Ratings Are Great

213 Pages·2018·1.4 MB·English

by  Charlie Leduff

ALSO BY CHARLIE LEDUFF
Detroit
US Guys
Work and Other Sins

PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2018 by Charles LeDuff Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages
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Portions of this book appeared in different form in Mother Jones, The New York Times, and Vice News.
ISBN 9780525522027 (hardcover) ISBN 9780525522034 (ebook)
Version_1
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Contents
Also by Charlie LeDuff
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
2013
Red, White & Rog
2014
Black Gold
The Blue, the Gray & the Green
No Color but the Red of Blood
The White Man’s Last Stand
How Green Was the Red Woman’s Valley
A Sea of Brown
Gray Donkeys/Burros Grises
Red Teeth
White Is the New Black
St. Louis Blues
Fade to Black
Brown Out
2015
Ebony & Ivory
Yellowhammer
Red Meat
Silver Bullet
Red Summer in White City
Don à l’Orange
Knights in White Satin
My Blue Hell
Brass Balls
2016
Yellow Water
And the White Horse You Rode In On
Die Whitey Die
Trail Mix: The Mad Dash to Oblivion in New Brown Shoes
2017
Tighty Whities
About the Author
2013
Red, White & Rog
NEW YORK CITY (AUTUMN 2013)—
I’d arrived full of piss and tonic, ready to pitch Roger Ailes my idea for a
national TV news segment called The Americans, but the morguelike
atmosphere dampened my enthusiasm. The Fox News offices in Manhattan were
a warren of cubicles with shitty fluorescent lighting and drab, yellowing paint.
People were cowed and hollow-eyed behind their cheap modular desks, tap-tap-
tapping numbly on their keyboards. Bill O’Reilly scuttled through the lobby,
scowling and distracted. He looked like hell without makeup, saggy bottomed,
squeezed like an old dishrag.
Papa Bear! I shouted to him, fist in the air, fight-the-power-like.
He threw a sour, dismissive wave and shambled on toward the elevator bank.
There he went: No Spin Bill, carrying the weight of the country’s number one
cable news show on those seductive, sloping shoulders. Give ’em hell, Papa
Bear!
Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, had a nice office, his door kept
sentinel by a young bombshell with black stockings and skirt and a tight sweater,
put together like the bevy of other young bombshells with black stockings and
ample cleavage who populated this Fox News mother ship, tap-tap-tapping. Who
created this Plasticine paradise? Who was the genius who came up with the
concept to marry family values with unquenched geriatric libido?
I was escorted into Ailes’s inner sanctum, chaperoned by two senior Fox
executives.
This Ailes, by the look of things, he knew how. A large, understated office.
A window facing uptown. A couch. A private toilet. A desk with absolutely no
paper on it. Nothing. No schedules. No contracts. No tissue. No disposable cup.
No lint.
It’s all done right here, said The Rog, pinched and slightly rotund, tapping
his pale, bald skull with an index finger. The map of the kingdom was carried in
his head.
his head.
Roger is a genius, explained one of the executives who brought me to meet
the Exalted. He built this from scratch and he keeps the recipe to himself.
My stars don’t like it, Rog said, but I go by instinct. How are my stars? They
don’t like the new schedule?
Stars, I thought. He called his commentators stars.
Well, I’m a local TV reporter for your Fox station in Detroit, I said.
I know, he responded, pointing to his magical skull. You wrote a book.
Yes, well, like I said in the book, Mr. Ailes, Detroit is not its own little freak
show. The whole country is bankrupt and on high boil. It’s a shitshow out there.
What I’d like to do is a series of dispatches for your local television group [Fox
directly owned eighteen local stations in America’s biggest markets, usually one
with an NFL team]. Go across America with a camera, show what’s really going
on between L.A. and New York. Get in touch with the real people. They’re
missing from your airwaves, you know. And the election’s coming sooner than
you think.
Rog looked at his executives and asked: Can we control him?
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I asked him just like that because
Rog was no shrinking violet. He was battle-tested. He’d been around the
barracks with that upper-plate smile, crooked and dangerous, his eyes glazed,
unhealthy, and bulbous. You just knew you could talk to Rog, the man who
created the “Richard Nixon Show” and then went on to create bullshit right-wing
TV news. Rog was the man who realized there was a tremendous audience of
people out there who were tired of the decades of bullshit left-wing news they
were being fed. So Rog was a genius.
Now, I was proposing something down-up and right down the middle,
something showcasing everyday people who were trying to get by as the country
and their way of life disintegrated around them.
I don’t want you going off and doing stories on Rupert Murdoch’s charities,
he said gravely.
What the wizard was telling me was that he didn’t want stories that would
cost him money or advertisers or instigate phone calls from the country club or
from The Boss himself. These were the same concerns of liberal media
executives. In the end, news isn’t really about keeping the public informed or
holding the powerful to account. It’s about cash money. The First Amendment is
a fine thing, but the Founding Fathers didn’t think to leave the media a revenue
stream. That’s why the industry pushes as many stories as it does about doped-