May 18, 2017
Empowered by a boss intent upon upending the traditional news media – Rupert Murdoch — and attuned to the anxieties and resentments of a slice of (mostly) white America that saw its country moving on without it, Roger Ailes played a singular role in changing the political media landscape of the United States.
As a young producer-turned-political tactician, Mr. Ailes, whose death was announced on Thursday, won credit for convincing Richard Nixon that he needed to take television seriously, that it was becoming the most powerful way to reach the American voter. After helping Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush win the presidency – and after a brief swing through the New York theater world — he made a late-career return to media, becoming the first to realize conservatism’s longstanding dream of having a forward operating base in what it saw as the liberal precincts of prime time.
He created the Fox News Channel, the top cable news network for 15 years running and a major profit center for Mr. Murdoch’s media conglomerate, 21st Century Fox. And in so doing, he created a cultural safe space for Americans pining for the way things were. His handpicked personalities, including Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, would attack notions of “white privilege” or hype (virtually nonexistent) in-person voter fraud and the latest perceived outrages of liberal America and its alleged abettors in the mainstream media. Fox News also occasionally fought back against shifting gender roles — and shifts in views of gender itself — in a on-set environment where men wore suits and women wore skirts and showed their legs.
Mr. Ailes died in disgrace, forced out of his network last summer in the wake of multiple allegations that he preyed upon women who worked for him with offers to bestow advancement and promotion in return for sexual relations (all of which he strenuously denied). Up until the day he died, federal investigators were looking into whether his regime at Fox News failed to properly account for settlement payments.
In what must have seemed like the final indignity, the big news in television ratings at the time of his death was that his longtime rivals MSNBC and CNN had managed to edge out Fox News this week in the advertising category important to advertisers, a rarity.
It was just a couple of nights, and Fox is still the No. 1 network on cable. But Mr. Ailes would not have been pleased. And the network is newly vulnerable with the recent ouster of its top star, Mr. O’Reilly, whom Mr. Ailes championed above all. The allegations the drove out Mr. Ailes helped set a precedent; later, the network concluded it could not hold on to Mr. O’Reilly after revelations in The New York Times that millions of dollars had been paid out to settle harassment charges against him, too.
The spikes at MSNBC and CNN this week can be largely attributed to the big, late-breaking news in The Washington Post and The New York Times about President Trump and Russia. In other words, those networks were capitalizing on the intense interest in the deep troubles in the White House engulfing Mr. Ailes’s friend, Mr. Trump, whose conservative-leaning, populist movement Mr. Ailes and his network did so much to seed and foster.
As Mr. Ailes saw it, his network was the only place in the news sphere for an audience that the mainstream media failed to appreciate and daily disrespected. Though Mr. Ailes became inconceivably wealthy during his career, he never lost sight of what bonded him with that audience: resentment for the “New York-Hollywood elitists” he believed populated the rest of the news media.
“They just believe what they believe and they think their job is to drag the rest of the redneck morons toward the light,” Mr. Ailes told me in an interview in his office in December 2014. “They don’t understand that the so-called redneck morons, the people they don’t like, are the people that grew up with values, patriotism, all those things. And they hate all those words.”
Mr. Ailes, who regularly reminded associates that he dug ditches as a teen, told me, “I built Fox news on my own life experience — I built it understanding the pressures and the worries and the aspirations of average Americans.” He said, “I love those people.” And he took credit for “forcing some people to actually acknowledge that others exist in the world beside the people who went to Elaine’s back in the old days.”
The enmity between Mr. Ailes and mainstream journalists was often mutual.
Shortly after news broke about Mr. Ailes’s death on Thursday, Jeffrey Jones, director of the prestigious George Foster Peabody journalism awards, said that through “a constant drumbeat of fear, anger, and hatred” Mr. Ailes had “helped craft an enormous gulf of distrust between people and news.”
Conservative distrust for the rest of the news media certainly redounds to Fox’s benefit. A Pew Research Center poll in January found that 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox News as their main source of news. As Pew put it, “There was no single source as pronounced among Clinton voters.”