Roger Ailes Ruined Monica Lewinsky?

It was big news when Roger Ailes died. Everyone in his industry acknowledged that a serious, even transcendent force in American media and politics had passed away. Without Fox News over these last 20 years, the shape of American politics would be far different. The heretofore unanimously liberal media suddenly had a counterweight, and, much to their horror, this uppity network soon had surpassed all of its rivals in cable news — combined. The era of unchallenged liberal enlightenment was over. Ailes was accused of making American dumber, angrier and more bigoted.

One notable Ailes critic really stretched reality beyond the breaking point. The New York Times — just off a successful crusade to get Bill O'Reilly fired — recruited Monica Lewinsky to blame Ailes for her plight in 1998. Her piece in the Times was not an obituary for Ailes, she wrote, but "an obituary for the culture he purveyed."

You read that correctly.

The headline read "His Dream Was My Nightmare." A pull quote read, "Roger Ailes built a ratings juggernaut by exploiting me." In this preposterous telling of the story, Lewinsky was the innocent young woman tied to the train tracks by the nefarious forces at Fox News. Forget her complete lack of judgment. Forget her moral turpitude. Forget Bill Clinton, too. Blame Fox.

She wrote: "Just two years after Rupert Murdoch appointed Mr. Ailes to head the new cable news network, my relationship with President Bill Clinton became public. Mr. Ailes, a former Republican political operative, took the story of the affair and the trial that followed and made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day. It worked like magic: The story hooked viewers and made them Fox loyalists. For the past 15 years, Fox News has been the No. 1 news station; last year the network made about $2.3 billion."

All because of Monica Lewinsky?

In her latest incarnation, Lewinsky is a victim of cyberbullying. She claims that's what she suffered at the hands of Clinton's critics. Is it cyberbullying to state she behaved like a complete slut, besmirching the honor of the Oval Office in the process?

Anyone who watched the news in 1998 knows that everyone in the media covered the Lewinsky scandal relentlessly. So, by Lewinsky's standard, everyone in the media was guilty of bullying and hooking viewers and padding their profits. Halfway through, she admits Fox was not alone. So why single out Fox and Ailes?

Lewinsky can be more upset with Fox because it didn't spin for Team Clinton and spend most of that year engaging in moral relativism, like, say, The New York Times, which pounded away at the puritanical Republicans and special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

The rest of us remember ABC's Diane Sawyer asking Starr whether he was the "sex police" and insisting: "There was gambling in the casino in Casablanca and you are the only one who is shocked. We are not shocked." She suggested the public viewed the Starr Report as "demented pornography, pornography for Puritans."

Lewinsky complained that Fox took a poll in the first weeks of the intern scandal asking whether she was a "young tramp looking for thrills." That's blunt. But what other words does one use for an intern who Starr reported flashed her thong underwear at the married president of the United States at their first meeting and later performed oral sex for him? "Overachiever"?

Five days after his death, Monica Lewinsky accused Ailes of exploiting a "personal and national tragedy" for profit. She is a pathetic creature and the perfect foil for The New York Times.

Previously:

• 05/19/17 Tim Allen's Hit Gets Canceled

• 05/17/17 Democracy Dies in Anonymous Sourcing

• 05/12/17 The Fake News of 'The Handmaid's Tale'

• 05/10/17 Historians Still Ruining Obama's Mythical Memoir

• 05/05/17 Crude Comedians of 'the Resistance'

• 05/03/17 Sudden Media Anger Over Happy Talk to Dictators

• 04/28/17 Reagan's Lesson for Trump

• 04/28/17 Trump's 100 Days of Media Hostility

• 04/21/17 Hypocrisy in the Anti-O'Reilly Army

• 04/19/17 Two Very Different Tax Days

• 04/14/17 PBS: 'Learning' to Love Suicide Bombers?

• 04/13/17 Hillary Blames Self-Hating Women for Her Loss

• 04/07/17 'Complicit' First Daughters and Double Standards

• 04/05/17 Susan Rice Is Still Lying

• 03/31/17 Samantha Bee: Great World Leader?

• 03/29/17 Fox News Covers 'Inconvenient' Rape

• 03/24/17'Saturday Night Live' Supports 9/11 Killers

• 03/22/17 Time to Stop Taxpayer-Funded Propaganda

• 03/17/17 Hollywood Rebels Under Trump

• 03/15/17 Hiding the Media's Disapproval Rating

• 03/10/17 ABC's Huge Gay Propaganda Flop

• 03/08/17 The Media's Anonymous-Sources Hypocrisy

• 03/03/17 Trump Hits a Home Run

• 03/01/17 Networks Yawn as DNC Lurches Further Left

• 02/24/17 A Speech to Denounce Meryl Streep

• 02/22/17 Planned Parenthood's Pandering Press

• 02/17/17 'Saturday Night Live' smears Kellyanne

• 02/15/17 Suddenly, Friendly Reporters Are Offensive

• 02/08/17 The Great Manipulators at Time

• 02/03/17 Hail the Gender-Fluid Scouts?

• 02/01/17 2017: The Year Conservative Protests Are News

• 01/27/17 HBO's Supervillainous 'Young Pope'

• 01/25/17 The Ongoing Gosnell Blackout

• 01/20/17 Snoozing at Teachers Who Abuse Children

• 01/18/17 Michelle Obama's Cult in the Media

• 01/13/17 Hollywood Vs. the 'Fascist' Election Result

• 01/11/17 Fawning Farewells? Not for Republicans

• 01/06/17 Freedom of Association Is Great ... for Libs

• 01/04/17 Can Speculation Be Defined as News?

• 12/30/16 Cultural Winners and Losers of 2016

• 12/28/16 The Newspapers Bully Sen. Sessions

• 12/23/16 The real War on Christmas . . . is a real war

• 12/21/16 Who is advocating for 'banana republicism'?

• 12/16/16 Obama Underlines Failure at 'The Daily Show'

• 12/14/16 Whitewashing the Black President's Legacy