Fox News Founder Broke America, Then Died

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Joseph Callahan, Opinions Editor

Fox News founder Roger Ailes died last month at the age of 77, shuffling off this mortal coil under a cloud of shame after a career spent in a haze of glory ― glory, that is, if you are a conservative Republican. If you’re a liberal, you may have well have pushed through normal human decency and celebrated his passing outright. After all, there was no one more fiendishly effective at harvesting the violently reactionary hatred that used to mostly coarse beneath the surface of American public life ― but which, thanks to Ailes’s ascension and the apotheosis of his friend Donald Trump, has become a rotten keystone of our political age.

Ailes’s rise happened because he was a masterful storyteller, one of the greatest the medium of television has ever produced. As the late journalist Joe McGinniss wrote in his classic, “The Selling of the President 1968,” Ailes first came to prominence as a producer on the Mike Douglas Show, which was marketed at housewives. A secret to the show’s success was its willingness to stage controversy. In 1963, for example, it featured perhaps the most controversial person in America at the time. Madalyn Murray O’Hare, an atheist, just three days after the Supreme Court handed down an enormously unpopular ruling outlawing school prayer. Roger Ailes, hired in 1965 at the age of 25, watched and learned ― though his real education into the television media world came as a child, when he was an obsessive watcher of TV. He grasped rhythms of the living-room medium and its seductive power to addle rational thought like nothing else.

When Richard Nixon, sitting in the show’s makeup chair in 1967, said, “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” Ailes did not humor the former vice president with a deferential chuckle. Instead, he told him if he kept thinking like that, he’d lose the presidency in 1968 just like he had in 1960. Then, according to McGinniss, Ailes lectured Nixon about all the mistakes he’d made on television in that campaign. Politics without television was inconceivable to him.

Nixon promptly hired Ailes ― just informally however, just like how Trump retained Ailes as an advisor on the 2016 presidential campaign.

The details of what Ailes thought Nixon did wrong are lost to history, but the critiques promptly resembled a memo Ailes wrote as a White House media consultant in 1970. “I think it is important for the President to show a little more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he moves through the crowd,” it read. “At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her. Women voters are particularly sensitive to how man treats his wife in public.”

Details mattered. Archetypes mattered. Complexity killed candidates. George W. Bush’s advisor Karl Rove liked to say that you have to watch TV with the sound off to understand how a campaign event is affecting people. Ailes understood that long before Rove did.

In 1968, Nixon campaign media innovations included the “three bump interview” (reporters got to enter the candidate’s cabin approximately two minutes before the flight attendants ordered them back to their seats for landing), the single daily campaign rally in an airplane hangar ― with only enough time for the film to be developed for it to be rushed immediately onto the evening newscast (less time to gaffe a feature) ― and most influentially, the “Man in the Arena” concept. That was when Nixon was asked questions by a carefully selected panel of “ordinary citizens,” which made him look like he wasn’t ducking public scrutiny. But that meant the only “scrutiny” he got was from people with no skill at asking tough questions (reporters were banished to a back room, watching on monitors), with a studio audience of loyalists to cheer him on. (“Sound like ten thousand people,” they were coached.) This was the perfect raw material to chop into 30-second commercials that didn’t look staged.

Like any reality TV show, the trick is casting. For one show, Ailes sought to recruit what he called a “good, mean, Wallaceite (a supporter of Governor George C. Wallace) cab driver… Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Alright, Mac, what about these n―rs?’” Nixon could then abhor the incivility of the words, while dog-whistling a “moderate” version of the opinion. And, as anyone who’s watched Fox News knows, the set was absolutely crucial, too. He once went ballistic, Ailes, when the curtains for Nixon to stand in front of were turquoise. “Nixon wouldn’t look right unless he was carrying a pocketbook,” he said. Ailes demanded their replacement with wood panels with “clean, solid, masculine lines.”

Masculine, feminine ― people who knew him could not have been surprised at the evolution of Ailes’s favorite set-dressing innovation on Fox News, decades later: leggy blonds, made up to a T, their legs always visible beneath the table. Nor could anyone have been shocked at his contempt for actual journalism, which he seemed to define as a liberal plot. In 1974, Ailes took on an abortive project to sell cheap, easy to use “news” segments for local stations without the resources to cover national news. Bankrolled by the far-right beer baron Joseph Coors, they marketed the service as “fair and balanced.” That way, Ailes wrote in a memo, they could “gradually, subtly, slowly” introduce “our philosophy ― conservatism…” in the news. The news, and media in general to him was about making a profit, entertaining the masses, and spewing his conservative beliefs into the minds of the inept and nonintellectual thinkers of his generation. Ailes knew that if he attacked the minds of the nonintellectual, the lazy, and the uninformed with “news” that was made to be entertaining, he would be able to create a new age kind of conservative thinker through Fox News. It was never about reporting actual journalism, and it still will never be over at Fox News.

For many who saw him up close, it can’t have been a shocker, either, to watch his downfall as a serial (alleged) sexual harasser. For Ailes, women existed to be put on display, and dominated: other men existed as audiences for his displays of domination. Media was a vector for channeling gut hatred. When Aristotle said man is a political animal, animals like Donald Trump weren’t what he had in mind. This president was Roger Ailes’s innovation. For that, he may rest without peace.