Some modern examples of “ratfucking,” Don Segretti's domain during the Nixon administration, as reported in Gabriel Sherman's “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country”:

[Fox News VP Brian] Lewis’s staff regularly fed reporters with embarrassing news and gossip about Fox’s competitors. After Andy Lack was quoted in the Times declaring he was “America’s news leader,” a Fox PR person sent an email to reporters that featured the quote and a Photoshopped picture of Lack’s face superimposed onto Napoleon’s body.

And this:

After MSNBC anchor Ashleigh Banfield generated positive headlines for her post-9/11 dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan—which featured her head wrapped in a shawl and her Clark Kent–style glasses peeking out—Lewis’s deputy, Robert Zimmerman, wanted to embarrass her in The Washington Post. “Take her out,” Brian Lewis told him. Zimmerman called Post reporter Paul Farhi and fed him a tip that foreign correspondents were laughing that Banfield, despite her intrepid image as a foreign correspondent, was scared to leave her hotel.

And this:

One morning in late fall 2001, Ailes called Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy and narrated a script for him to read. “Steve, just say that [CNN news anchor] Aaron [Brown]’s your dentist. Then have your co-anchor say, ‘He’s not a dentist. He’s on CNN!’ … No matter what happens, even if they torture you, say he’s your dentist!” Doocy obediently followed Ailes’s stage direction.

And this:

“Fighting with Roger Ailes is a full-time job, and I already have one,” [NBC News President Bob] Wright said.

The story gets worse during the Iraq War. The lengths they'll go to push their narrative. The lengths they'll go to end that narrative at Firdos Square.

This is a truly shameful period in American history ... and brought to you by Roger Ailes.

Fox News: We decide. You repeat.