Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post Live had an interesting interview with a panel of analysts and bloggers discussing the Republican Party, conservatives, and the media particularly Fox News,  and radio broadcasters such as Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham.  Referring to the “conservative entertainment complex”,  the major theme was that the Republican Party has been manipulated by the media such as Fox much to the Party’s detriment.  The most interesting comments came from Joe Muto, the man better known as the “Fox News Mole”.

Back in April, Muto lit up the Internet with a series of anonymous posts on Gawker that lifted the curtain on some of the goings-on at Fox News. The network promptly fired him and sent the police after him.

He talked to HuffPost Live host Abby Huntsman about how jaded some of the behind-the-scenes talent at Fox News is.

“The people at Fox are not stupid,” he said. “They know when they have Dick Morris or one of these other pundits on predicting a landslide victory for Romney, the people behind the scenes know that it’s all bluster. They know that this is sort of an entertainment. They know that a lot of these people are just hucksters … we producers know that this is all a farce. The reason we don’t step in and give a reality check to our audience is because that’s terrible for ratings.”

Muto also talked about Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and predicted that the network will sand down some of its hard-right edges in coming years.

We will see.

Tony