Obama Met With Fox News Executives

[NYCGirl]

I'm posting this for those people upset about tonight's taped O'Reilly appearance. There seems to be an agreement.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/02/AR2008090202730.html

At a secret meeting with Barack Obama three months ago, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes says, he tried to clear the air with the Democratic senator by saying that his organization was determined to be fair but would not be "in the tank" for Obama's campaign.

During the sit-down in a Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite in Manhattan that included Rupert Murdoch, the network's owner, Obama expressed concern about the way Fox was covering him. "I just wanted to know if I'm going to get a fair shake from Fox News Channel," Ailes recalled him saying.

"Senator, you're the one who boycotted us," Ailes says he replied. "We're not the ones who boycotted you. Nor did we retaliate for your boycott."

The meeting appears to have eased tensions between the two camps, which began when all the Democratic candidates, complaining that the network favors Republicans, refused to hold any primary-season debates on Fox. After resisting invitations for months, Obama now plans to appear on Bill O'Reilly's prime-time Fox program on Thursday, the night that John McCain delivers his acceptance speech at the Republican convention here.

Ailes said in an interview Tuesday that he would never have discussed the matter publicly had Vanity Fair not published an account of the earlier portion of the meeting, in which Murdoch sat on one side and Obama and advisers David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs on the other. The article, based on a forthcoming book about Murdoch by Michael Wolff, says Obama told the Australian-born mogul that he didn't want to waste time talking to Ailes if Fox was going to keep attacking the senator and his wife and portraying him as suspicious and foreign.

-snipped-

Ailes, who joined the meeting in progress and spoke to Obama for 20 to 25 minutes, disputed the article's assertion that the candidate had "lit into" him. He called Obama "a very charming guy" who is "very smart" and was "gracious" throughout the meeting.

MORE AT LINK

[Franks Wild Years]

1. A bit more on Murdoch's role...

In the article, to be published on Friday, Wolff says Murdoch, partly due to the influence of his third wife Wendi, is "becoming a liberal - sort of".

"Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can't be missed - he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O'Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up - because the money is the money; success trumps all - in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets."

The article, based on almost weekly interviews with Murdoch over a nine-month period, also paints a revealing portrait of Murdoch's love of mischievous gossip, his closeness to his children, his visceral passion for newspapers and his unsated ambition to add to his empire.