Thread: Trump Campaign Manager Reveals Fox News Debate Chief Has Daughter Working for Rubio

Trump Campaign Manager Reveals Fox News Debate Chief Has Daughter Working for Rubio

Chip Somodavilla/Getty

by MATTHEW BOYLE
28 Jan 2016
DES MOINES, Iowa

DES MOINES, Iowa — Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager for 2016 GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, exposed a blatant conflict of interest on Wednesday that the Fox News Channel has been hiding for months.

Lewandowski showed how Fox News has been hiding the fact that Fox News Channel Vice President Bill Sammon has a daughter working for the campaign of the Washington establishment-backed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) .Sammon’s daughter, Brooke Sammon, is Rubio’s national press secretary, and obviously both have a vested interest in the success of the Rubio campaign and the demise of the other campaigns.

CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Lewandowski about Fox News’s controversial anti-Trump statement from Tuesday evening—and specifically the network’s claim that the top Trump aide had allegedly made threats against Fox News anchor and Thursday debate co-moderator Megyn Kelly—when he responded by dropping the explosive revelation.

Lewandowski revealed two things for the first time: that the executive he was discussing matters with was Bill Sammon, and that Sammon’s daughter Brooke Sammon works for Rubio’s campaign, giving the first-term Floridian Senator an obvious boost. That blatant conflict of interest has never before been disclosed to the viewers of Fox News by the network.

“Not only did I not make threats, but the conversation with the Fox News executive—his daughter works for the Rubio campaign, he’s one of the executives on Fox that writes the debate questions so maybe he has his own ulterior motives, I’m not sure,” Lewandowski told Burnett in the Wednesday evening CNN interview. He went on:

But his daughter is a senior executive on the Rubio campaign, maybe he should disclose that before he’s writing the debate questions for Fox. There were no threats made. The bottom line is this isn’t about me and it’s not about Megyn Kelly. It’s about the way that Fox News put out a statement about Mr. Trump that’s wholly inaccurate and unfair and it’s very difficult to treat someone fairly when they’re the GOP frontrunner when you put out a statement like that.

When Burnett followed up, Lewandowski doubled down. “What I said was the Fox News executive who oversees the debate process, their daughter is a senior executive on the Marco Rubio campaign—is what I said,” the Trump campaign manager said.

A Fox News spokesperson has not responded to Breitbart News’s requests for comment throughout the day on Wednesday. A Rubio spokesman, communications director Alex Conant, responded to a Breitbart News inquiry on this matter by standing up for Brooke Sammon and questioning Breitbart News’s integrity.

“It’s no secret Breitbart traffics in conspiracy theories, but this accusation is a whole new level of crazy,” Conant said in an email. “Brooke is a star of our campaign and her integrity and professionalism is second to none. If you’re worried about someone’s integrity, you should do some serious self examination.”

Conant has not answered a pair of follow-up questions. One question Conant won’t answer centers specifically on whether Brooke Sammon has ever in any way communicated with her father about the Rubio campaign–including regarding debate matters. The other question Conant won’t answer is why, if “Breitbart traffics in conspiracy theories,” Sen. Rubio’s campaign provides Breitbart News with exclusives like the one earlier on Wednesday about his new ad targeting Evangelical voters.

“I believe you can’t have a strong America without strong families. I believe in the fundamental freedoms that make us great. And I believe in God; that God has blessed America,” Sen. Rubio says in a new advertisement he provided exclusively to Breitbart News, for instance. Conant and his team provided Breitbart News with that exclusive mere hours before changing their tune on Breitbart News.

Bill Sammon is a Fox News Channel Vice President and the bureau chief of that network’s Washington, D.C. team. Several times leading up to the previous Megyn Kelly-co-moderated debate back in August 2015, it was confirmed that Sammon was personally involved in crafting the entire focus of the debate.

For instance, on Howard Kurtz’s Aug. 2 Media Buzz show on the Fox News Channel, Kurtz and Fox’s Chris Stirewalt confirmed that Sammon is the “secret weapon” crafting the questions.

“You’ve been to this rodeo before,” Kurtz asked Stirewalt. “How do you and Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier and Chris Wallace go about formulating your questions, knowing the candidates are going to try to pivot to their talking points?”

“Well, the first thing is we have a secret weapon and that is Bill Sammon, who is the best at not only team cohesion and keeping everybody on point about what the point is, but in crafting the questions,” Stirewalt replied before Kurtz interjected that Sammon is the Fox News Channel’s “Washington bureau chief.”

“Absolutely, he’s a managing editor and a great mind and a great journalist and so that is a big help,” Stirewalt finished.
In addition, a Washington Post pre-debate profile of Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace—one of the other debate moderators alongside Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier—confirmed Sammon’s involvement in crafting the narrative of the debate.
Of course, that profile quotes Wallace as saying he has several “doozies” prepared for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.
“On a recent Thursday morning, Wallace walked the few steps from his small, memorabilia-filled office — his father’s Rolodex, a photo of him playing hoops with Michael Jordan — to the more spacious suite of his boss, Bill Sammon, the vice president of news, who had called together a small debate-prep meeting,” the Post’s Krissah Thompson wrote.

Thompson then detailed what the debate-prep room was like one day when Wallace and Sammon prepared for battle, quoting the two of them extensively—and making clear that Sammon was in charge.

What’s interesting, however, is that these people, who claim to be journalists—Wallace, Baier, Kelly, Stirewalt, Kurtz, and pretty much everyone else at the Fox News Channel, especially Sammon—all committed what is pretty much a cardinal sin in journalism: They didn’t disclose a major conflict of interest ahead of a presidential debate. That conflict, of course, is that Brooke Sammon—Rubio’s national press secretary—is the daughter of Fox News executive Bill Sammon.

Brooke Sammon is no small player in Rubio’s orbit, either. She’s second in command to Rubio communications chief Alex Conant, and has worked for the senator for years.

The network did not disclose this conflict of interest to anyone–most importantly, the 24 million people who watched that first debate this summer. It’s unclear why the network has hidden this detail. Other GOP presidential campaigns have been whispering about pro-Rubio bias at Fox, but none have been willing to publicly hammer the network, except for Trump.

Lewandowski has gotten close to exposing this conflict of interest before—making an allusion to it on Good Morning America on Wednesday morning—but not until his CNN appearance was he so explicit.

“It’s a shame, when you have a conversation with some of the Fox executives, you’d hope they’d keep that conversation private,” Lewandowski said on GMA. “Instead you have executives over there who have relatives working for other campaigns. These are the people who are putting debate questions together.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...r-marco-rubio/

Wow! That is a huge, huge, huge conflict of interest. Bad Fox, Bad, Bad, Bad. Does Murdoch know about this?

Originally Posted by Judy

Wow! That is a huge, huge, huge conflict of interest. Bad Fox, Bad, Bad, Bad. Does Murdoch know about this?

Of course he does. Remember that he turned FOX over to his sons last year and they are now in charge. Ithink old Rupert is busy getting engaged to Jerry Hall (See below)


This is from the liberal publication -THE NATION.

 What the Fox Is Going On Between Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch’s Sons?

Could shifts in Murdoch’s empire mean a kinder, gentler Fox News?

By Leslie Savan

JUNE 22, 2015

Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch in London, July 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)


Many of us on the left have long harbored a fantasy about Fox News, and for a moment this week it seemed it just might come true.

The fantasy goes something like this: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch will one day hand real control of his empire to his somewhat more liberal (or at least not rabidly conservative) sons. Then, for reasons personal and/or political, they will demote, defang, or dump Fox News chief Roger Ailes, master conjurer of right-wing resentment and generalissimo of the Republican Party. Without the brilliant bad boy at the helm, we’ll come to know a kinder, gentler Fox, conservative but conscientious, tabloid but truer to the facts. All that Fox talent, on air and off, will drop their daily rage performances or self-deport.

I know, I know, that’s not going to happen. But with headlines this week, like “Roger Ailes Burned By Murdoch Sons In Fox News Power Shift” or “Fox News as we know it may be screwed,” you couldn’t help but hope.

What triggered such dreams was the announcement last week that, effective July 1, the 84-year-old Rupert will step down as CEO of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, and hand the reins to his son James, 42. His oldest son, Lachlan, 43, will also be promoted, to executive co-chair of the company, a title he’ll share with Rupert himself. Some sort of succession plan has long been expected, so on its own, none of this was earth shattering.

But then, on June 11, Fox Business Network reported that, the brothers’ ascension notwithstanding, Roger Ailes will be “reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch.”

“This was, apparently, news to Rupert,” veteran Ailes-watcher Gabriel Shermanwrites in New York magazine. Because five days later, a 21st Century Fox spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that no, like everyone else, “Roger will report to Lachlan and James but will continue his unique and long-standing relationship with Rupert.” (In yet another example of how willful thinking shapes Fox fact-checking, the “news” that Ailes would report directly to Rupert was planted by Ailes himself, according to Sherman’s source.)

No doubt Ailes’s unique relationship with Rupert will continue, and word that he’ll have to first run things by James and Lachlan may be a meaningless formality, a way to save the Murdoch clan’s face.
But for Fox News’s parent company to publicly contradict Ailes is a rare humiliation for the 75-year-old former adman for Nixon and GHW Bush. It’s “effectively a demotion,” says Sherman (who wrote the book on Ailes), and possibly worse:

For much of the past 15 years, Roger Ailes has operated with virtual impunity inside Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Nothing, it seemed, could induce Murdoch to rebuke Ailes publicly, even if Ailes forced Murdoch to choose between him and his sons. Such was Ailes’s power that he has been able to run a right-wing political operation under the auspices of a news channel.

This week, for the first time, there are signs that this remarkable era may be entering its twilight.…
According to sources, the fact that Fox’s ratings held steady during Ailes’s leave of absence last year over a health scare has given the Murdochs confidence that Fox could endure in the post-Ailes era. It’s an era that now seems to be closer.

Ailes has often forced Murdoch to choose between him and his sons. When Lachlan worked in New York as deputy COO of the Fox broadcast group, he and Ailes had such vicious power struggles that, in 2005, he stunned his father by quitting and retreating to Australia. Rupert enticed him back into the family business just last year.

The clashes between Ailes and Lachan (who has called himself conservative, though he’s not nearly as partisan as his father) appear to have been more about office politics than the nation’s.

But arguments with James have been, and could be in the future, closer to the kind you’d see on Hannity. James is an environmentalist; he helped lead the campaign to make Murdoch’s News Corporation carbon neutral, even as Fox News has been the earth’s most effective climate change-denier. (News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, and 21st Century Fox were part of the same company until 2013, when Murdoch split them up.) James has also donated between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 to the Clinton Foundation, where his wife, Kathryn, once worked. As Media Matters points out, the Clinton Foundation “has been the target of a smear campaign by conservative media figures, including near-constant scandal-mongering on Fox News.”

Never one to hold back, Ailes has called James “Fredo” and, for not being able to contain the company’s phone-hacking scandals in the UK several years ago, a “****ing dope.”

So let’s play out the liberal fantasy: Will any of this make Fox a few shades bluer?

As long as Ailes stays in any capacity, almost certainly not. Ailes boasted recently that his contract, up for renewal in 2016, will sail through, because he holds the key to Rupert’s political ambitions. “‘Rupert is going to need me to elect the next president,’ Ailes is said to have told an associate,” writesSherman. He’s noted that Ailes is leaning toward Scott Walker. Which makes sense. The Wisconsin governor is highly experienced at union-busting, a skill close to Rupert’s and Roger’s hearts.

But regardless of whom Ailes has to report to, or whether he retires early, or whether the Murdoch boys manage to bruise his ego, it’s safe to say that Fox News will not become a tamer version of itself any time soon. The brand is baked in; Bill Shine and other Ailes enforcers have the formula for changing fear and resentment into money. Fox News is hugely successful—netting $1 billion annually, “nearly 20 percent of 21st Century Fox’s total profits last year”—and it’s populated with enough Obama-, Hillary- and lib-hating true believers to forever thwart my fantasy.

But then, who knows? Maybe James and Lachlan will learn how to transform their own, substantial resentments into billions, too.
http://www.thenation.com/article/wha...murdochs-sons/



Jerry Hall, 59, and Rupert Murdoch, 84, announce their ENGAGEMENT in The Times after a whirlwind four-month romance

• Model Jerry Hall and media baron Rupert Murdoch began dating in summer
• Mr Murdoch proposed over the weekend while in LA for Golden Globes
• Marriage will be the billionaire businessman's fourth and Miss Hall's first
• Her and Mick Jagger's 1990 Hindu ceremony in Bali is not legally binding

By REBECCA DAVISON and STEPHANIE LINNING FOR MAILONLINE and TIM LAMDEN FOR THE DAILY MAIL and FRANK COLETTA FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

PUBLISHED: 19:51 EST, 11 January 2016 | UPDATED: 17:45 EST, 13 January 2016

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and former supermodel Jerry Hall have announced their engagement after a whirlwind four-month romance.

Mr Murdoch, 84, revealed the news on the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of the The Times, which is owned by his News Corporation.

The couple got engaged in Los Angeles over the weekend, where they attended the Golden Globes awards gala in one of their few public appearances as a couple.

The billionaire's new fiancee, Miss Hall, 59, has four children with former partner Sir Mick Jagger, although the couple were never legally married.

Scroll down for video



Whirlwind romance: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 84, and former supermodel Jerry Hall, 59, posed arm-in-arm on the red carpet of the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday night. Mr Murdoch proposed over the weekend



+18


Announcement: Mr Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corporation, which owns The Times, shared the the news of their upcoming nuptials in an article on the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of the newspaper

Mr Murdoch and Miss Hall started dating in the late summer after being introduced by one of Murdoch's sisters and his niece in Australia.

The couple made their relationship public in October when they were seen for the first time together at the Rugby World Cup final at Twickenham in London.

They were next seen walking arm-in-arm down the red carpet ahead of the Golden Globes awards ceremony on Sunday, although Miss Hall did not appear to be wearing an engagement ring.

The classified advertisement announcing their engagement reads: 'Mr Rupert Murdoch, father of Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, James, Grace and Chloe Murdoch, and Miss Jerry Hall, mother of Elizabeth, James, Georgia and Gabriel Jagger, are delighted to announce their engagement.'

A spokesperson for the Murdoch family told MailOnline: 'They have loved these past months together, are thrilled to be getting married and excited about their future.'

No date for their wedding has been given.



+


Glamorous: The couple, who have been dating since September, joined A-listers at the glittering ceremony



Family affair: Mr Murdoch and Miss Hall were joined at the event by his son Lachlan and daughter-in-law Sarah


Star-studded: Miss Hall and Mr Murdoch posed backstage with popstar Lady Gaga moments after she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a limited series/TV movie for FX's American Horror Story: Hotel

It will be Mr Murdoch’s fourth marriage, having divorced Wendi Deng in 2013. His first marriage was to Australian Patricia Booker and he then married Glasgow-born journalist Anna Torv.

It will be Miss Hall’s first official marriage after an unofficial ceremony with Jagger in 1990 was declared invalid after the pair ended their 23-year relationship in 1999.

Australian-born Mr Murdoch has been careful to ensure the financial future of his six children, with each being given a share in News Corporation's profits.

Only James and Lachlan, Mr Murdoch's two sons to second wife Ms Torv, are directly involved in the running of his media empire, which owns the Sun, the Wall Street Journal and Fox Entertainment Group.

It is understood Ms Torv, who was married to Mr Murdoch for 32 years, walked away with a settlement worth $1.7billion when the couple divorced in 1999.

Meanwhile Ms Deng was given a $44million New York apartment, a $20million property in Beijing, in addition to assets as per the couple's pre-nuptial agreement, when she split from Mr Murdoch in 2013. However, she has no equity in News Corporation and no voting rights in the business.

It is not yet clear whether Mr Murdoch plans to give Miss Hall, who has an estimated fortune of $15million, a stake in the company.


Going public: The couple made their first appearance together at the Rugby World Cup Final last October


Loved-up: The pair couldn't help but smile as they walked into Twickenham for the sporting fixture, where they were seen wearing scarves and waving flags in support of Mr Murdoch's home nation of Australia


Relaxed: Miss Hall looked delighted as she shared a light-hearted moment with Mr Murdoch during the game

Mr Murdoch and Miss Hall, originally from Texas, were introduced two years after the end of his 14-year marriage to Ms Deng.

His split from the Chinese businesswoman - who he met when she was interning at one of his TV stations - amid rumors of her 'infatuation' with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

After informing their children of their blossoming relationship, Mr Murdoch and Miss Hall went public in October at the Rugby World Cup Final in London, where they sported matching Australia scarves in support of the mogul's home nation.

The couple's joy was apparent as they walked into the stadium arm-in-arm, smiling and waving flags.

They were later seen sharing a joke as they watched the action from a box, before Mr Murdoch leaned over to give Miss Hall a tender kiss on the cheek.

At the time, a family friend of the Murdochs told The Mail on Sunday: 'It's all very new. They are really enjoying each other's company very much.'

Another friend elaborated: 'He is very fond of her. There is no question that they are a couple,' before adding that both Rupert and Jerry's children were aware of the relationship.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...#ixzz3yZgBloni
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

From Mick Jagger to Rupert Murdoch? Wow. That's a switch!

Originally Posted by Judy

From Mick Jagger to Rupert Murdoch? Wow. That's a switch!

It's all about the money!

Thumbs up for Jerry Hall!

Originally Posted by lorrie

It's all about the money!

Thumbs up for Jerry Hall!

Absolutely!