There never would have been a Fox News or a President Donald Trump without Roger Ailes.
Ailes’ influence was like a mutant disease that passed untreated from generation to generation of political conservatives, linking the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
He singlehandedly transformed the United States into a darker, more sinister place by appealing to the seven deadly sins of political conservatism: racism, greed, misogyny, fear, envy, misanthropy, and rage.
Ailes was perhaps a worst human being than either Nixon or Trump.
How’s that for an epitaph?
Ailes was ousted in 2016 from Fox News — the network he created with Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch twenty years earlier — after a series of women, including most notably, Gretchen Carlson, a former news anchor, charged him with sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.
https://time.com/4413767/roger-ailes-fox-news-resigns-rupert-murdoch/
The New York Times reported that Carlson’s lawsuit “set in motion a cascade of allegations from women, who reported unwanted groping and demands for sex by him. Some of them described an overall culture of misogyny at Fox News.”
Ailes received a parting gift of $40 million from Fox.
The sexual harassment scandal at Fox also led to the firing of Bill O’Reilly, the network’s face of blustering fact-free journalism.
So there was an upside to the scandal.
Gabriel Sherman, the author of an Ailes’ biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, included the story of a female producer seeking a job at NBC, where Ailes once served as a news executive. She said he offered to pay her an extra $100 a week “if you agree to have sex with me whenever I want.”
What made this proposal particularly outrageous was that Ailes only paid his wife $75 a week to have sex with him anytime he wanted.
There was no one or nothing that Ailes wouldn’t screw if the price was right – including American democracy.
Ailes had a malevolence toward human beings and a genius for television, convincing former Vice President Richard Nixon that he could reinvent himself as a politician by using what was then a new medium.
The New York Times said Ailes worked to make Nixon more likable.
This was a lot easier than making Nixon less likeable.
Ailes became perhaps the most important political strategist of the next half-century, helping to elect GOP presidents and other politicians by frequently relying on perpetuating racism and nursing grievances.
Ailes protégé, Lee Atwater, described Ailes as having “two speeds: attack and destroy.”
Ailes then created the modern GOP in his image, that of rabid – and lecherous – bulldog, and then did the same thing with cable television by creating Fox News with Rupert Murdoch.
Ailes and Murdoch understood that there was a lot of money to be made by creating a news network if it didn’t concern itself with producing factual news.
Fox News was a brilliant marketing concept that embraced that long-festering Ailes’ complaint that the news media had a liberal bias.
He then sold this idea to millions of cable viewers with the disingenuous slogan, “Fair and Balanced.”
https://www.vox.com/2017/5/19/15660888/roger-ailes-america-trump-television-fox-news
Fox News wasn’t fair or balanced.
Fox News also was neither a fox nor was it news.
Fox News was like a circus peanut, which of course is neither a circus nor a peanut.
Vox said Ailes thought that Americans had little interest in the news and how it was reported and instead gave viewers what Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to President Donald Trump, called “alternative facts.”
SEE KELLYANNE CONWAY
“Fox News excelled at wrangling facts — and sometimes fictions — into familiar points of view. It transposed the bewildering world of current events onto simple storylines: us versus them, regular folks versus elites, the righteous versus the unjust,” Vox said.
“One of the central convictions Ailes brought to Fox News was a sense that conservatives were under siege, politically and culturally: The mainstream media was a liberal conspiracy; coastal elites were sneering at the honest folk of the heartland (Ailes was born in Ohio); ‘real’ America was crumbling and liberals were dancing on its grave. These Nixonian anxieties, amplified onscreen, sustained an ecosystem of indignant zeal, from the Tea Party to the Benghazi witch hunt to the birther movement.
“And these were the same kinds of grievances, of course, that carried Donald Trump to the presidency . . . . Trump, in many ways, represents the culmination of Ailes’s decades-long project to cultivate a strain of conservatism that is native to the idioms of television. His affect is technicolor; he speaks in sound bites; he distills ideas to their simplest, and always caps them with an emotional appeal. He is at heart a performer — obsessed with the surfaces of things.”
https://www.vox.com/2017/5/19/15660888/roger-ailes-america-trump-television-fox-news
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/politics/roger-ailes-donald-trump/index.html
CNN commentator Chris Cillizza wrote shortly after Ailes’ death that Fox News became the “north star of Republican politics,” transforming politics and making it possible for someone like Donald Trump to not just run for president but to be elected.
“The mainstream media viewed Trump’s candidacy as a sideshow – rich guy TV celebrity pursues hopeless but ego-stroking presidential campaign. But what Trump knew was that the Republican Party base didn’t listen to – or even like – its congressional leaders or establishment thinkers anymore. The voice they listened to came from Fox News. And that voice was Roger Ailes,” Cillizza said.
“The strains of Ailes-ism were everywhere in Trump’s campaign – from the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan to the suspicion of the influence of immigration on the country to the open disgust for the media. Trump was the manifestation of the Fox News philosophy in a candidate . . . .
“The election of Trump is, simply put, Ailes’ greatest triumph.”
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/politics/roger-ailes-donald-trump/index.html
