Roger Ailes, influential Fox News founder, dies
Broadcaster, GOP political operative altered U.S. politics.
Broadcaster built channel into powerful political force over 20 years before ouster in sex scandal.
Roger Ailes, the communications maestro who transformed television news and America’s political conversation by creating and directing Fox News Channel for two decades before being ousted last year for alleged sexual harassment, died Thursday, according to his wife, Elizabeth. He was 77.
Ailes died after a fall in the bathroom of his Palm Beach, Fla., home May 10 caused bleeding on the brain, the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office said. Ailes fell in his bathroom, hit his head and was bleeding profusely.
A former operative for GOP presidential candidates including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and a one-time adviser to President Donald Trump, Ailes displayed a mastery of modern messaging early in his career. Then he changed the face of 24-hour news when, in 1996, he accepted a challenge from media titan Rupert Murdoch to build a news network from scratch to compete with CNN and other TV outlets they deemed left-leaning.
That October, Ailes flipped the switch on Fox News Channel, which within a few years became the audience leader in cable news. Ailes branded the network “Fair and Balanced” and declared he had left the political world behind.
But conservative viewers found a home and lifted prime-time commentators Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to the top of the news ratings.
“He has dramatically and forever changed the political and the media landscape singlehandedly for the better,” Hannity tweeted Thursday.
Fox News and 21st Century Fox executive chairman Murdoch in a statement called Ailes “a brilliant broadcaster (who) played a huge role in shaping America’s media over the last thirty years.”
“He will be remembered by the many people on both sides of the camera that he discovered, nurtured and promoted,” Murdoch said. “Roger and I shared a big idea which he executed in a way no one else could have. In addition, Roger was a great patriot who never ceased fighting for his beliefs.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recalled Ailes’ influence on the nation’s politics.
“Roger Ailes was a genius at politics and the news media. His advice to Presidents Nixon and Reagan was historic and helped elect both,” Gingrich tweeted.
“The history of cable television will have a very big chapter on Roger Ailes. Without his success at Fox News, Trump could never have won.”
Others laid the nation’s political dysfunction and inability to find common ground at his feet, saying he created the atmosphere for Trump to succeed.
“It’s a very complicated story,” said Gabriel Sherman, author of the Ailes biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” “He is in some ways a genius and in some ways tragic. His quest for power consumed him.”
By mid-2016 Ailes still ruled supreme as he prepared to celebrate Fox News’ 20th anniversary. But in little more than two weeks, both his legacy and job unraveled following allegations by a former anchor that he had forced her out of Fox News after she spurned his sexual advances.
The lawsuit filed July 6 by Gretchen Carlson quickly triggered accounts from more than 20 women with similar stories of alleged harassment by Ailes either against themselves or someone they knew.
Reportedly, a key witness was Megyn Kelly, the network’s superstar personality, whose voice was conspicuously missing in the chorus of women and men at Fox News who spoke up on behalf of Ailes. Their defense did little to staunch the widen- ing scandal. Despite Ailes’ denials, Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, determined that Ailes had to go. The announcement was made July 21.
Before Carlson’s bomb- shell legal action, Fox’s roaring success and enormous earnings insulated Ailes from suspicion as well as from his past scrapes with the Murdoch sons over who he would report to.
His dismissal was a head- spinning downfall and a breathtaking defeat for Ailes, a man who all his life seemed to be spoiling for a fight and was used to winning them.
Born in Warren, Ohio, on May 15, 1940, Roger Eugene Ailes described his work- ing-class upbringing with three words: “God, country, family.”
Afflicted with hemophilia, he spent much of his early years housebound in front of, and fascinated with, television, and after graduation from Ohio University landed an entry-level position at a TV station in Cleveland that had just started a local talk and entertainment program starring a has-been former big-band singer named Mike Douglas.