A pugnacious conservative
Roger Ailes was the pugnacious chairman and chief executive of Fox News who moved effortlessly between the media and politics, promoting his brand of conservative showmanship while developing the art of selling politicians to an increasingly sceptical audience.
He identified a right-wing, populist and patriotic gap in the broadcast news market and filled it with Fox News, leaving the more ponderous and mildly liberal CNN in its wake.
Even under the presidency of George WBush, Fox News was known as the broadcasting wing of the White House, but during the Obama years Ailes went farther, introducing a partisan form of reporting that not so much merged entertainment with politics as blended it in a liquidiser.
Critics described him as Rupert Murdoch’s monster, referring to Murdoch’s chairmanship of 21st Century Fox (Murdoch is also the chairman of the parent company of The Times). If so, Ailes was a very lucrative monster, with Fox News reporting profits last year in the region of $1 billion and Ailes enjoying a salary in the region of $21 million.
He described his upbringing as ‘‘God, country, family’’, adding that it was this credo that was behind the success of Fox News.
He cherished a bygone age, dreaming of seeing the US return to being the America of the Midwest circa 1955 - and circumstances gave him the opportunity to promote that dream.
Soon after his arrival at Fox in 1996 President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky came to light.
For Ailes this was manna from heaven, and with Fox News’s shocked, in-your-face delivery of every sordid detail, he watched with delight as the channel’s viewing figures quadrupled.
Anything that smelt liberal was under attack: claims that President Obama was born outside the US received prominence; deniers of climate change were given airtime; and allegations that Obamacare would lead to the creation of ‘‘death panels’’ had the nation running scared.
Ailes, a bulky figure addicted to Haagen-Dazs ice cream and resigned to the size of his girth, was once described as having ‘‘two speeds - attack and destroy’’, and he deployed both to great effect.
Robert, his brother, once described Ailes as being ‘‘like a pitbull with no fear’’.
Yet such was the mass of contradictions within Ailes that according to Norma, his second wife, he would crawl out of bed to sleep on the floor with a sick dog.
Unsurprisingly, scandals were never far behind. Some he dismissed as inconvenient, such as the outrage over his alleged description of a rival executive as a ‘‘little f***ing Jew prick’’, but allegations of sexual misconduct engulfed him. Ailes denied all the allegations and a federal investigation continues.
Roger Eugene Ailes was born in Warren, Ohio, the second of three children of Robert, a factory worker who had violent tendencies, and his wife, Donna, who embroidered handkerchiefs.
On one occasion Robert urged his son to jump from the top bunk into his arms, but at the last minute stepped away. The lesson, his father declared, was ‘‘don’t ever trust anybody’’.
As a toddler Ailes was diagnosed with haemophilia. When he was two he bit his tongue and nearly bled to death. He never bit his tongue again, in any sense.
Later he suffered from arthritis that made him hobble, although he considered pain to be a badge of honour.
He studied at Ohio University in Athens. During his first year his parents divorced and he tried to join the US Air Force, but was rejected on medical grounds. Instead he turned his attention to campus television, receiving a tip from Marjorie White, the station manager’s girlfriend, about a vacancy.
He and White were married in 1960.
His first job was as a producer for The Mike Douglas Show. Richard Nixon appeared as a guest in 1967, then hired Ailes as his television adviser. He helped to polish Nixon’s appearances, paying attention to clothes and make-up. Nixon had dismissed such things, but Ailes convinced him otherwise, declaring during the 1968 election that ‘‘communication is power’’.
By the 1980s he was theorising his views in You Are the Message, saying that a candidate’s politics were not so important to voters as being ‘‘likeable’’.
He was soon image-maker-inchief for Republican contenders for the White House.
When Walter Mondale challenged Ronald Reagan’s advancing years in a debate in 1984, Ailes had Reagan’s retort prepared. ‘‘I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience,’’ Reagan retorted.
When George HW Bush seemed to be struggling against Michael Dukakis, Ailes produced a television commercial that attacked the governor of Massachusetts, who had championed penal reform, for giving ‘‘weekend furloughs to firstdegree murderers’’.
He left NBC in 1995, and the next year joined Fox, helping to create Fox News. Meanwhile, his first marriage ended in 1977 and he married Norma Ferrer, a producer. That was dissolved in 1995 and three years later he married Elizabeth Tilson, a former television executive about 20 years his junior.
Tilson survives him along with their son, Zachary, who is a student.
Roger Ailes, television executive, was born on May 15, 1940. He died after a fall on May 18, 2017, aged 77.