Fox chairman Ailes shaped his times far more than most

We don’t have to settle

As we watch Oklahoma’s budget process, it’s plain to see what is valued most. Oklahoma is at or near No. 1 in jailing its citizens. We are at or near dead last at funding education. Incarceration and education are not unrelated at budget time. Choices are made. The cure for leaders who refuse to honor our values is the ballot box. Let’s hire politicians who are capable of putting education before incarceration.

We can’t undo the past few years that got us into this mess, but 2018 will be here before you know it and we can build a better future. About half of Oklahoma’s citizens are registered to vote and of those, about half decide our elections. There is time to update voter registration for those who have moved from their precinct so polling places are closer to home. There is time to encourage all of our friends and relatives to register.

The demands of everyday life press in but our votes can shape the values elected officials bring to the budget process. Oklahomans don’t have to settle for a minority choosing poor governance forever. We don’t have to lead America in locking up our populace while trailing America in educating our own kids.

Isolated?

“Another point of view” (ScissorTales, May 13) refers to “isolated instances of people who might be inadvertently harmed as a result” of the recent vote to overhaul the Affordable Care Act. Isolated? Really? Do you mean the estimated millions who stand to lose their medical coverage altogether, or the millions of other sick, older and poor people who face greatly increased premiums, if they can get insurance at all? I don’t think these many millions of people are “isolated” in any way. n my first visit to Roger Ailes’ office, I half expected to find him petting an enormous white tiger, perhaps feeding it from a bowl of raw meat. After all, this was at the height of Ailes’ reputation as a kind of James Bond villain (and well before the sexual harassment scandals that ended his career).

That wasn’t his reputation in-house at Fox News (where I am a contributor), of course. He elicited enormous affection and loyalty from most of the people who worked for him. But in a field that trails only Hollywood and pop music for its capacity to create divas, Ailes understood that fear — which tends to encourage humility — was a useful tool for managing superstars.

Over the course of the meeting it became clear that Ailes was sizing me up for a project he thought I might be right for. His language was alternately ribald and cerebral. I realized there was a brilliance behind the bawdiness; it helped him take the measure of people. I’ve often joked that Ailes was an odd mix of Boss Hogg and Aristotle.

But Aristotle is probably the wrong comparison. Aristophenes — the Greek playwright — is a better fit.

Ailes was proud of the fact that he got his start in theater. He told me he brought that sensibility to television. TV is an entertainment medium, one that appeals to the rational parts of our brains but also to the emotional parts. This was not an insight unique to Ailes, but he understood better than most that if the emotional part (what people see) wasn’t working, people wouldn’t pay attention to the rational parts (what people said).

That’s why Ailes famously watched the news on mute when he was assessing talent. “If there was nothing happening on screen in the way the host looked or moved that made me interested enough to stand up and turn the sound up, then I knew that the host was not a great television performer,” Ailes wrote in his book, “You Are the Message.”

Of course, he took his understanding of human nature and drama to politics as well. Discovered by Richard Nixon, Ailes went on to become one of the most influential political consultants in American history.

When Ailes started Fox News, the joke goes, he discovered an underserved niche in television news: half the country.

Most of the people who decry Fox News as “right wing” either don’t watch it or cherry-pick quotes from the opinion side. The truth is, Fox was always more nationalist and populist — patriotic, if you prefer — than ideologically conservative. Ailes had a healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) contempt for the journalistic establishment, which by the early 1990s had become ideologically cosmopolitan. As a broad generalization, the elite media saw itself as a kind of transatlantic guild, with at best loose attachments to this country, and a dim and cynical view toward anything that smacked of not just conservatism, but patriotism and traditionalism.

For example, in 1987, Columbia University held a symposium with political, journalistic and military leaders. The journalists were asked if they’d agree to embed with an enemy army unit. They said they would. When asked if they would tip off Americans about to be ambushed, then-ABC News anchor Peter Jennings agonized and finally said he would. Mike Wallace of CBS chastised Jennings, saying it was “another story. … You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!” Jennings switched his position.

Ailes not only had contempt for this kind of thing, he understood that many decent Americans shared it.

Dramaturgically, Ailes’ vision for Fox News was predicated on the belief that America is a decent country — particularly in the vast middle where coastal elites do not dominate — and that there is no inherent contradiction between good reporting and the sort of patriotism common to journalists such as Walter Cronkite and Ernie Pyle.

Fox’s populism was an easy fit with American conservatism for two decades because populist indictments of liberal elites and conservative ones overlap a great deal. In the era of Donald Trump that overlap has been attenuated somewhat, and that has been a challenge at Fox — and beyond.

Ailes, a man of demons and angels, brilliance and bawdiness, shaped his times more than almost anyone. It would have been fascinating to hear his ultimate answer to that challenge.

TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY