This past year has been a turbulent time for Fox News but nothing has been more troubling for them than the passing of the man who made them. Fox News founder and ex-CEO Roger Ailes reportedly has passed away at the age of 77. Roger Ailes resigned from his position at Fox News after 20 years amid sexual harassment lawsuits from former employees such as anchor Gretchen Carlson. Ailes had a career that spanned five decades. He advised many political figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He even had a hand in advising current president Donald Trump in his successful run to the White House.
Roger Ailes created a real-life evil empire that has successfully divided America by political lines and stoked racial tensions. There There are several books about the storied and often times ominous career of Ailes. However, none is more detailed than the book The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Country by author Gabriel Sherman. In the book, Sherman details Aile’s rise to prominence. He started his career in his twenties as an adviser to the Nixon 1968 Presidential Campaign. He famously told Richard Nixon on the set of The Mike Douglas Show, “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes brashly chided Nixon, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”
Television, to Ailes, was a way to shape public perception. He pushed the notion of “liberal media bias” into the political mainstream. He started during his time within the Nixon campaign where the assertion that conservative politicians voices weren’t being heard in the media started to get traction. In a memo leaked to the press at that time he even advocated that a White House television news service be created to be a counterbalance to regular news.
Another one of Ailes’s unfamous and greatest hits comes from his unofficial advisement of George H.W. Bush. Bush Sr., being branded as Ronald Reagan lite, was instrumental in pushing the former president to be more angry and scrappy. The change caused Bush Sr. to win the 1988 election after overcoming a 17-point deficit in the polls. After reaching the height of the conservative political arena, he turned his attention to full-time media manipulation. Rush Limbaugh, the ignorant irritant that we know today, worked with Roger Ailes in creating and producing a television show for him in 1992.
Ailes then migrated to CNBC and created the talk-radio-on-television experiment America’s Talking. After that, he moved on to create Fox News in 1996. That’s when he cemented his place in history and became America’s premier political supervillain. Why worry about Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity when the master mind behind the whole operation was Ailes all along? They were mid-level croneys that only toted the company line and ideology that Ailes created.
His media manipulation tactics during his 20 years at Fox News reached steroid levels. By 2002, Fox News overtook CNN as the most watched cable news channel in America. Even still while he was at Fox he advised political figures. A perfect example is his reported advisement of George W. Bush about war and terrorism. The book Bush At War by Bob Woodard reports that Ailes advised then-president Bush that going to war would curry the favor of the American public post 9/11. Woodard details what Ailes told Bush:
“The American public… would be patient… as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible.”
His advisement of Bush and other political figures signaled a massive conflict of interest. How could you possibly be objective as a company when your founder and CEO is coaching politicians in how to handle the media? You wouldn’t expect any semblance of morality from a sexual harasser anyway. Ailes ruined the lives of many and shouldn’t be honored. However, we can’t deny the fact that he was a media manipulating genius. We must learn from our enemies and there’s a lot that we can learn from this modern-day tirant.
Sources: 1) How Roger Ailes Created Modern Conservatism, Politico
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