According to one highly-placed source, Solivan worked out of what Fox insiders called “the Black Room,” an operation Ailes established around 2011 to conduct PR and surveillance campaigns against people he targeted both inside and outside the company. The “Black Room” was located on the 14th floor of the News Corp building at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, a quiet part of the office that housed Fox News Latino and some marketing and promotions employees. Fox employees Ken LaCorte and Jim Pinkerton, veteran political operatives who’ve worked with Ailes since the 1980s, also worked with Solivan, the source said, adding that Ailes’s personal lawyer, and Fox contributor, Peter Johnson Jr. advised the team. (In an email, Peter Johnson denied any involvement in “Black Room” campaigns, saying, “The only online campaign I’m aware of is yours attempting to create a truth from a fiction with this account.”)
Targets of the campaigns included journalists John Cook and Hamilton Nolan, who have aggressively covered Ailes for Gawker. According to one source, private detectives followed Cook around his Brooklyn neighborhood and Fox operatives prepared a report on him with information they intended to leak to blogs. (According to the source, one proposed line of attack claimed that Cook — whose wife, Slate news director Allison Benedikt, is Jewish — was anti-Semitic.) “I’m honored to be among Roger Ailes’s enemies,” Cook said.
Ailes also used those resources to go after local journalists, Andrea Mackris (Who accused Bill O'Reilly of sexual harassment, and the author of this New York Magazine article, Gabriel Sherman, just to name a few.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Ailes also used them to attack journalists or bloggers who reported negatively on other on air "talent," such as Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling, and of course Sarah Palin.
(Gee, that might help to explain who paid those assholes to make up stuff about me and put in on the web back in 2009.)
I have a feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg over at Fox News and that the really terrible stuff concerning Roger Ailes and others is still waiting to be uncovered.
Source http://ift.tt/2aE2Y6R
