Mr. Ailes had created the greatest news show on earth. Even the Fox News slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” was somehow a mantra anyone could remember: It tweaked Fox’s strait-laced competitors and winked to delighted Republican viewers.
Fox was cleaning our clocks in the ratings in part because conservatives were flocking to that one network while the rest of us scrapped over the remaining and divided moderates, independents and liberals. But to claim Fox’s success was only political would be a cop-out. They were just better. And I needed to figure out why.
.. Mr. Ailes would pick one or two “hot” stories, add numerous live guests and stick to that story throughout the day. Many cable viewers, it turned out, were not interested in television news’s bread and butter — a diverse newscast of multiple dispassionate stories — no matter how important. Despite what they might tell pollsters, viewers were clearly looking for a great yarn, and Mr. Ailes knew how to spin one.These days that sort of live blanket coverage (for example, a certain plane crash on CNN) has become far more commonplace but had been considered anathema to the very fiber of what a news network ought to be doing.
Mr. Ailes was equally adept at knowing what not to cover... So while MSNBC and CNN were focusing on the challenges and failures of the war, Fox covered the story far less often, and when they did so, in a far more sanguine way, highlighting successes from the field... Mr. Ailes didn’t seem to care how anyone reacted to his often-controversial network... Fox News would simply ignore them or hit back harder, on the air or through its relentless public relations department. There were no objective norms, no establishment rules, no journalistic sanctity. Just Roger’s rules... We knew it was the right call when Mr. Ailes began treating Mr. Olbermann’s success as a potential threat, leading him to instruct Bill O’Reilly to refrain from responding to Mr. Olbermann’s attacks.
With Roger Ailes Out, Will Fox News’s Influence on Politics Change?
For more than two decades, the network helped legitimize political issues like birtherism and “death panels” and usher into the mainstream the shock-jock language embraced by Mr. Trump.
.. “Roger Ailes is the epitome of somebody that is not politically correct and has the guts to say a lot of what Americans are thinking,” said Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, who used Mr. Ailes as a consultant in his early campaigns in 1986 and 1990. He added, “It will be interesting to see where we go from here.”.. “Once Fox made it an issue, then all of the sudden Congress made it an issue, and it was something that the Bush administration hadn’t seen as an issue, but suddenly became a big priority.”.. at times David Axelrod would meet directly with Mr. Ailes to address a flare-up — but those were not always successful.“Basically, Roger was going to do what Roger was going to do,” Mr. Axelrod said, calling the Fox News chief “brilliant.”
Who will succeed Roger Ailes?
One person said that on Fox News Channel’s set in Cleveland Tuesday afternoon, after the Ailes news broke, it “felt like a funeral.”
.. Shine, who is described as a man with ideologies to the right of Ailes, was in Cleveland helping with RNC coverage.
.. While there is a feeling that the Murdoch brothers will want to do little to radically reformulate a strategy that has put Fox News on top during the 2016 election cycle, there is plenty that can be done to change the culture of the place without touching the line-up, if the Murdochs choose to. One possibility being discussed among Fox staff: that a cleaning house of top executives, like legal and business affairs chief Dianne Brandi and PR chief Irena Briganti may be coming soon.
.. James Murdoch wants Fox News to be more like Sky News in Europe
.. The Financial Times reported Tuesday that several popular Fox News hosts, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren, have clauses in their contracts that allow them to leave if Ailes should depart.
.. More fanciful reports have a cabal of major hosts leaving the network with Ailes to form their own network, designed to compete with Fox News. That would seem to be a steep climb, and an expensive one.
.. 2016 is shaping up to be a banner year for cable news ratings. 2017 will almost certainly see ratings declines across the board. If the Murdochs do want to implement their own vision for U.S. cable news, next year would be a good year to do it, and the departure of Ailes this year may give them the freedom to execute that vision, whatever the final version may be.
How Roger Ailes Created Modern Conservatism
Toppled by a cascade of sexual harassment charges and said to be nearing the exits at Fox, Ailes will be remembered for undermining the dominant 20th-century model of objective journalism with his defiantly right-wing news channel. But he was equally important in transforming politics itself. Not only did he tutor presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in the ways of media politics, but he was largely responsible for two of the signal changes in American political culture since the 1960s: the rise of television as a national force and the emergence of cultural populism as a key feature of the Republican Party.
.. In fact, apart from the presidents he served, he was arguably the single most important figure in the creation of modern conservatism. By fusing television’s power to conjure feelings of anger and resentment to an ideology of cultural populism that demonized liberal elites, Ailes set forth the methods and the message that would help conservative politicians win and maintain power for decades. That is, until Trump, who, this week in Cleveland, officially closed his hostile takeover of the party that Ailes helped build, using the very tactics Ailes had pioneered.
.. Ailes also encouraged Nixon to practice the politics of resentment that came naturally to him, creating the basic formula used by Reagan, both Bushes and countless lesser conservative politicians: playing on the public’s sense that powerful liberal were getting ahead at the expense of Middle America.
.. An emerging wisdom held that television watchers absorbed their knowledge about public affairs at a gut level, more visceral than newspaper readers, making them especially susceptible to emotional appeals, particularly of the conservative kind.
.. Ads and other forms of messaging would emphasize how spineless or elitists liberal politicians were betraying these voters on a host of values-laden issues—often racially charged ones—including crime, drugs, busing, welfare, affirmative action and national security.
.. The pinnacle of Ailes’ direct political influence came in the 1988 campaign of Vice President George Bush. When
.. Ailes, serving as Bush’s media adviser and unofficial strategist, injected anger and fight into Bush’s message and persona by prodding the candidate to go on the attack. After a weak showing in the Iowa caucuses, the effete Bush viciously assailed his main rival, Bob Dole, in the ensuing primaries, and in the fall he shamelessly smeared the cerebral Michael Dukakis, painting the Democratic nominee as soft on crime, unpatriotic and even un-American. An Ailes protégé, Larry McCarthy, developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that highlighted the case of a black inmate
.. Ailes convened focus groups to test which messages would most effectively make the case for using military force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
.. In 1992, while assuming no formal position in the reelection campaign, Ailes persuaded Bush to deride Bill Clinton’s patriotism, which the president did by making baseless insinuations about a trip Clinton had taken as a young man to Russia.
.. Early on, he appreciated the emotive power and influence of talk radio, including rising stars like Rush Limbaugh. In 1992, Ailes created and produced a TV show for Limbaugh—it ran until 1996
.. Limbaugh and a bevy of similar radio and TV hosts operated very much in the Ailesian vein: militant in their ideology, aggrieved in their attitudes, provocative in their rhetoric.
.. He led CNBC for a while
.. Kelly made her name by embarrassing Karl Rove on election night 2012, when he insisted, against the evidence, that Mitt Romney might yet win Ohio and that calling the election for Barack Obama was premature. Later, Kelly surprised Dick Cheney by telling him, “History has proved that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” Her willingness to confront Donald Trump over his record of sexist rhetoric in last summer’s Republican debate launched her to new heights of fame, embodying Fox’s bid for broader respectability
.. Given changing attitudes about women and sex, the macho and often anti-feminist conservative populism in which Ailes believed so deeply had become increasingly hard to tolerate or justify. The women accusing Ailes aren’t, for the most part, liberal, but their charges are made possible by the triumph of liberal ideas on gender equality.
.. If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day:If Republican regulars opposed Trump for his centrist deviancies, he owes his success in the primaries to the fact that he ran to the right of his rivals on the most salient issues of the campaign—immigration and terrorism. In short, he espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day: the substitution of bluster for reason, the angry scapegoating of others, the blind hatred and exaggerated fear of liberals in power,
.. Trump used his own celebrity to circumvent the rules of television altogether—gaining free media by capitalizing on the endless appetite for debate, argument and talk that Ailes had done so much to popularize.
In a way, Donald Trump beat Roger Ailes at his own game. Like so many other revolutions, the conservative revolution now eats its own.