CBS prez formerly VP at Fox News. Also Frank Luntz hired as analyst. Too many Fox people.

[madfloridian]

I had wondered what was going on at CBS. 60 minutes has become untrustworthy, and Republican strategist Frank Luntz is working for both Fox and CBS. More about Luntz below.

From Brad Blog:

The Fox 'News-ification of CBS News and 60 Minutes

The President of CBS News is David Rhodes. He was hired in February 2011. He was formerly the Vice President of News at Fox "News".

Again, the current President of CBS News was formerly the VP of News at Fox "News".

According to his bio posted at CBS: "Rhodes began his career as a Production Assistant at the newly-launched Fox News Channel in 1996, where he later became Vice President of News. At the network he managed coverage of three presidential elections, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hurricanes including Katrina, and was the channel's Assignment Manager on the news desk the morning of September 11, 2001."

From Media Matters in September 2013:

CBS Hires Frank Luntz, The Man Who Reportedly Shepherded The Plan To Defeat Obama

Luntz's hiring came a few months after New York Times Magazine contributor Robert Draper reported that Luntz orchestrated a "2009 meeting where prominent Republicans formulated a plan to win back Congress and the White House."

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: "Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it - please?&quot

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president's economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama's economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

It's really hard to doubt that Luntz has done a great job of teaching Republicans how to use catch phrases and slogans, teaching them to use terminology that twisted the meaning of issues. Our side needed someone like him at times so we would go on the offense in language instead of playing defense all the time.

In an article from yesterday in The Atlantic some of the things came out that Republicans truly believe about caring for the poor and needy and for seniors. Sounds like Luntz had a bad reaction to Romney's loss. Took it very personally. But his words about things like safety nets are chilling to me. It is what many conservatives and some Democrats truly believe.

The Agony of Frank Luntz

And yet, over the hour and a half I spend talking with him—the first time he has spoken publicly about his current state of mind—it's hard to grasp what the crisis is about. Luntz hasn't renounced his conservative worldview. His belief in unfettered capitalism and individual self-reliance appears stronger than ever. He hasn't become disillusioned with his very profitable career or his nomadic, solitary lifestyle. His complaints—that America is too divided, President Obama too partisan, and the country in the grip of an entitlement mentality that is out of control—seem pretty run-of-the-mill. But his anguish is too deeply felt not to be real. Frank Luntz is having some kind of crisis. I just can't quite get my head around it.

His side had lost. Mitt Romney had, in his view, squandered a good chance at victory with a strategically idiotic campaign. ("I didn't work on the campaign. It just sucked, as a professional. And it killed me because I realized on Election Day that there's nothing I can do about it.&quot But Luntz's side had lost elections before. His dejection was deeper: It was, he says, about why the election was lost. "I spend more time with voters than anybody else," Luntz says. "I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don't know shit about anything, with the exception of what the American people think.

He seems to be fearful that he is wrong about what the people overall truly believe. I surely hope he is right. This paragraph expresses his Ayn Rand type of philosophy.

But what if the Real People are wrong? That is the possibility Luntz now grapples with. What if the things people want to hear from their leaders are ideas that would lead the country down a dangerous road?

"You should not expect a handout," he tells me. "You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don't, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them." The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. "We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that's why they voted for him," he says. "And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great."

That is at least two people from Fox News they have hired at CBS in the last few years. I am so disgusted that CBS hired them. I really wish they had not.