Fox News, like its president Roger Ailes, is sensitive about its reputation. So sensitive, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, that in the late aughts, as part of a new, more muscular PR strategy, the channel instructed its staff to write thousands of pro-Fox comments on websites large and small, wherever anything slightly anti-Fox bubbled up. In his new book Murdoch’s World, about the Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch, Folkenflik reports:Fox PR staffers were expected to counter not just negative and even neutral blog postings but the anti-Fox comments beneath them. One former staffer recalled using twenty different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had one hundred. [...] Old laptops were distributed for these cyber operations.
One of the targeted sites, we are reliably told, was Gawker itself, along with niche industry sites like TVNewser, Inside Cable News, and FishbowlDC. “Even blogs with minor followings were reviewed to ensure no claim went unchecked,” Folkenflik later explains.
The channel’s painstaking management of online criticism tracks closely with its executives’ efforts to clean up their own Internet presences. For example, Irena Briganti, the network’s senior vice president of media relations, hired a shady Google-gaming company in order to bury negative stories about her brutal PR tactics.
We’re curious, though: What were these fake commenters writing, exactly? Under so much pressure to blanket the Internet with pro-Fox propaganda, they couldn’t have been that intelligent or effective.
This is one of the strangest articles I've ever seen.
So apparently Fox set up an "anti-anti-fox campaign" across the internet, literally paying people to argue. Can anyone here from 2007-2010 attest to a rather large number of seemingly pro-Fox people?
Anyway, what do you think of this, NSG? It seems like this might backfire rather hard, what with them tarnishing their reputation by trying to improve their reputation.
Also, inb4foxnewsagentsITT
