What Roger Ailes Figured Out
Roger Ailes launched Fox News with a simple but effective premise: most news outlets were liberal, and most Americans were not.
.. He was known for ruthlessness
.. Sean Hannity, whose show airs at 10 p.m., has propagated wild theories about the murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer; on Tuesday night, after an outcry (and an embarrassing foxnews.com retraction), Hannity said he would desist.
.. Part of the genius of the network was that its existence, and its unabashed pugnacity, reliably incited outrage from other, avowedly nonpartisan media outlets, thereby reinforcing the network’s own message. By criticizing the “liberal” media, Fox News set the bait; any outlet that tried to rebut this criticism was, in a twisted way, corroborating it.
.. It is true that there were plenty of good reasons to ridicule and excoriate Fox News. But, even so, these responses only widened the partisan divide that made Fox News so successful.
.. Ailes’s strategy might have inspired his competitors to copy him.
.. But in the end, of course, MSNBC responded to Fox News by becoming a decidedly liberal news network instead, using the form that Ailes pioneered
.. This may require a more aggressive approach: a more intense focus on the leakers in the Administration, for instance, coupled with a claim that the various investigations into Trump constitute a perversion of democracy.
.. But it’s clear that the underfed audience that Ailes identified is as hungry as ever. It’s not hard to imagine that Fox News will find a way to keep feeding it.