Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington v. Roger Ailes

Fox News creator Roger Ailes, the patron saint of red blooded conservative victim hood, made a rare appearance in front of the camera Sunday, on ABC’s This Week, where he introduced himself by offering to pose nude for $100 (if it was still 1982 and he was Scott Brown), went on to defend Glenn Beck against the critique of Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington, and finished by offering President Obama some political advice. Barbara Walters asked the questions:

WALTERS: What advice would you give to Barack Obama?

AILES: I think he’s in a very tough spot. He is enormously likable and I think despite what everybody says, people would like him to succeed. But he came in with the belief that the radical change he wanted or what some people say is a radical change that he wanted would be widely accepted.

WALTERS: But give him some advice, boom, boom, boom now.

AILES: The first advice I’d give him is listen to everybody and then go in a dark room by yourself, because in the end, it’s all going to happen in your brain. If you actually believe all these things that you’re for, and Richard Neustadt in “Presidential Power” explains that the only real presidential power is the power to persuade the people, to be open, to go out to them and say this is the reason I believe this, this is the direction I believe the American people should go. If he doesn’t do that and I don’t think he can sell some of his programs. I think he has to become president of all the people and I think he’s got to go to transparency and I think you’d be surprised. People who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but you can’t do this in back rooms surrounded entirely by political consultants.

As good a media exec as he is, there is no doubt that Ailes, an old Nixon hand, also knows his politics. At another point, he broke the reigning consensus at the table:

AILES: Jobs is the second issue, in my view.

WALTERS: What’s the first?

AILES: Safety and sovereignty of the United States

The full roundtable transcript after the jump.

CORRECTED, UPDATED — Cable News Irony Alert: CNN, Fox and The Disappearing General Audience

CORRECTION: Ahh, the pitfalls of technology. In the post below, I wrote about an ad that kept running Sunday morning on CNN, which I watched in the background as I scribbled away at my office. Several times, I heard an ad for Anderson Cooper’s show that included a woman’s voice talking about being a “lifelong [...]

The Cup of Coffee: White House’s David Axelrod Meets With Fox News’ Roger Ailes

On a recent visit to New York, White House adviser David Axelrod met over coffee with Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News network, which President Obama has described as a “television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration.” According to accounts from both the White House and Fox News, the meeting [...]