The Fox News makeup treatment is unlike any other in journalism. It involves false lashes, layers and layers of foundation and heavy applications of come-hither lip gloss.
.. Sexing up female reporters — even those from The New York Times — was part of the Fox News look as conceived by Roger Ailes
.. he had specific ideas about how women should treat him off-camera, as well.
While Mr. Ailes doled out attractive female anchors in revealing outfits as eye candy, his empire thrived partly on its audience’s widespread fear of the only woman who has ever had a real shot at the presidency, the person I was there that day to discuss: Hillary Clinton.
.. Over two decades, Fox News made Mrs. Clinton one of the longest-running villains on TV. Mr. Ailes would rewrite her part over the years:
- In the 1990s, she was a bra-burning affront to stay-at-home mothers;
- in her Senate race, she was an entitled wife riding on her husband’s coattails;
- by the 2008 primary, she was Lady MacBeth, desperate to star in her own production.
.. But Fox News also gave something to Mrs. Clinton: proof of the “vast right-wing conspiracy
.. If there was any poetic justice, it was that a woman caused the downfall of Mr. Ailes in the end.
The dark source of Roger Ailes’s power
he was trotting out his standard case about the lack of respect he received in New York, despite his immense professional accomplishments.
.. They all look down their noses at me.” Roger was having trouble making his point, though, because of the parade of well-wishers who kept interrupting to shake his hand, kibitz and flatter
.. “Kind of undermines your point, doesn’t it? Half this restaurant is kissing your ring.” “Yeah,” he replied without irony. “But they hate doing it.”
.. That worldview of unending grievance was the cornerstone
.. The Internet did not, as is so often alleged, usher in the siloed media environment.
.. Ailes did that — by proving that there is money, influence and power to be found in serving well-defined interest groups instead of trying to please the widest possible audience.
.. Ailes knew that repetition is the key to buy-in
.. The channel’s ideological prism also insulated Fox News from the bane of traditional outlets — the slow news day
.. Producers could always unearth obscure stories that would be judged trivial by traditional journalistic standards and fit them into a larger narrative about the assault on values
.. The War on Christmas, anyone?
.. “But if you try to come after me from the right, I’ll have to kill you.”
.. he had a different objective: turn talking points into news items for millions of persuadable eyeballs.
Roger Ailes’s (Other) Legacy
Remembering the founder of Fox News also demands remembering the many women in his orbit—women who refused to be silent.
Ailes took her to the day after she accepted her job with the network. During it, she claims, Ailes asked her, “When did you first discover you were sexy?” When she replied that “I am finding this conversation very embarrassing,” her new boss persisted. “He continued to explain,” she recalls, “how much he believed in loyalty and how much he believed the best expression of that loyalty comes in the form of a ‘sexual alliance.’”
.. Other women at Fox remembered Ailes asking them a litany of personal questions, ostensibly to expose vulnerabilities that he might exploit later on. “He asked, ‘Am I in a relationship?’” one woman recalled. “‘What are my familial ties?’ It was all to see how stable or unstable I was.”
“Roger had made sure I knew the stakes, telling me: ‘I don’t like to fight, but when I do, I fight to kill.’ The message could not have been clearer: ‘If you tell anyone, I will destroy you.’”
.. But Ailes, in the end, had aged into a new context—one in which women have access to recording devices, and in which, through the internet, women have access to each others’ stories, and in which, in general, women have had enough. Secrets, now, have a way of getting out. The sins of the past have a way of becoming the scandals of the present. Women today have more ways than ever of fighting back.
Roger Ailes Has Died
Since Ailes has resigned from FNC, the channel has floundered, as Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan attempt to re-make it in their image — a more “moderate” channel to appease the global elite. Bill O’Reilly, the primetime lineup’s ratings powerhouse, and Bill Shine, a longtime deputy to Ailes, were both ousted after waves of negative press accusing the former of sexual harassment and the latter of enabling sexual harassment.