Fox news chief created media juggernaut
Roger Ailes mastered the art of selling political candidates like Hollywood celebrities and was the architect of conservative- oriented TV news.
Ailes, who died Thursday aged 77, was the longtime chairman and chief executive of the Fox News Channel, building it over two decades into a politically influential juggernaut until his abrupt ouster last year amid sexual harassment allegations.
According to The Associated Press, the Palm Beach, Fla., Police Department received a 911 call on May 10 reporting that Ailes had fallen in his bathroom, struck his head and was bleeding severely. Paramedics took him to the hospital. It was not known whether he was discharged from the hospital.
At Fox News, Ailes presided over a cable outlet that combined television news from a conservative perspective with the rabble- rousing rhetoric of right- wing talk radio to produce a singularly influential media machine. He was a skilled showman, a savvy political operator and a proudly plebeian counterpoint to the East Coast elite that he believed dominated the news business.
To Democrats and liberals, he was a manipulator of the news, a puppet master who used his network to turn minor stories into blazing scandals, ostensibly in service of his personal politics.
To Republicans and conservatives, he was an essential counterweight, a tough but fair partisan, a middle American from a blue-collar background who gleefully and effectively poked holes in the left-leaning biases of the news media establishment.
The titles of biographies about him — four were published within seven years at a peak in Fox’s popularity during the Obama administration — demonstrated the wrath and resentment he could engender: He was a “Dark Genius,” “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” ruler of a “propaganda machine.”
Ailes eschewed political labels and preferred to portray himself as a craftsman of the airwaves, more concerned about how to frame a shot or drive a story than about the fate of individual candidates or policies. He told a biographer that his dream for America was that it be allowed to return to its best self, which he put in the Midwest in about 1955.
As founding CEO of Fox News in 1996, Ailes defined the channel in opposition to the traditional journalism of CNN and the liberal bent of MSNBC, and he brought Fox from a distant third to clear dominance, riding to the top along the wave of public dismay over Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern.
Ailes’ reign at Fox ended abruptly in 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, after an on- air host at Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, alleged that Ailes had sabotaged her career when she refused to have sex with him. Following Carlson’s accusations, 25 other women, including Fox’s most prominent female anchor, Megyn Kelly, came forward to say that Ailes had sexually harassed them over his five decades in the TV business.
Fox’s parent company quickly pushed Ailes to resign his positions, though he said the allegations — which ranged from kissing women against their will to telling women that they had to provide him with sexual favours if they wanted their careers to flourish — were false. Ailes’ bosses, Lachlan and James Murdoch, the sons of Fox’s longtime owner, Rupert Murdoch, announced the resignation in a statement that emphasized the company’s “commitment to maintaining a work environment based on trust and respect.”
Fox paid Carlson US$ 20 million to settle her harassment claim against Ailes. Within weeks, Ohio University removed Ailes’ name from the newsroom it had named after one of its most famous alumni; the university also returned to Ailes a US$ 500,000 gift he had made to his alma mater.
Like Richard Nixon, the first presidential candidate Ailes worked with, he seemed driven as much by social and class resentments as by ideology or a lust for power.
Critics and admirers alike agreed Fox was a mirror of Ailes’ ideas about content and presentation. “Roger Ailes is not on the air, Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera, and yet everybody who does is a reflection of him,” radio host Rush Limbaugh, whose TV show Ailes produced in the 1990s, once said.
Ailes often responded to his critics by saying that they intentionally elided Fox’s straight- ahead news reporting with the frankly conservative views of its commentators. He noted the network regularly broke stories critical of leading conservatives, including George W. Bush’s arrest as a young man for drunken driving, a story Fox reported the week before the 2000 election, when Bush won his first term as president.
Ailes, derided on the left as a Republican kingmaker, was actually more of “an entertainer,” New Yorker writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote. “He’s also a bogeyman,” an easy target for those who want to believe the conservative movement was manipulated from above rather than a naturally occurring political phenomenon.
Roger Eugene Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio, on May 15, 1940, and was the son of a physically abusive father, who worked as a supervisor at an automobile plant, and a demanding but emotionally withholding mother.
His father, according to a story that biographers called Ailes’ “Rosebud” moment, once urged young Roger to jump from the top of his bunk bed into his father’s open arms. But as the boy leapt, the father stepped away and Roger landed hard.
“Don’t ever trust anybody,” Robert Ailes told his son.