Broadcast visionary kicked off right-wing revolution
Pioneer in TV news hit highs and lows during career
Roger Ailes, who died Thursday, forever changed media and political discourse in America.
Ailes birthed conservative television news coverage in the mid-1990s by launching Fox News and encouraged the careers of numerous pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
He left Fox News Channel defiantly last July after allegations of sexual harassment at the network.
“Roger played a huge role in shaping America’s media over the last 30 years,” said Rupert Murdoch, chairman of 21st Century Fox, who hired Ailes as Fox News’ first CEO. “He will be remembered by the many people on both sides of the camera that he discovered, nurtured and promoted.”
The Palm Beach County, Fla., medical examiner ruled Thursday that Ailes dies from bleeding
on the brain brought on by a fall. He was 77.
Ailes began his political career as an adviser to Richard Nixon in 1968. “He really brought the instinct of a political operative to television,” said Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland-College Park and a former journalist at NBC.
He advised subsequent presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
A NEW KIND OF COVERAGE
In Fox News, Ailes tapped into conservatives’ resentment toward the fourth estate.
“Unlike others, he actually did something about it,” said Bruce Bartlett, a former political consultant and author of The Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks, forthcoming in October.
“What’s really important in what Ailes did is that he was effective politically and culturally but also enormously profitable,” Bartlett said. “This can’t be underestimated.”
A huge fan of Fox News, Donald Trump channeled much of the network’s political messaging during his presidential campaign and mixed it with populist promises of bringing jobs back.
He snatched crucial victories in swing states that had previously voted Democratic.
“Trump is the perfect Fox spokesman. If he (wasn’t) the president, he’d have his own show,” Bartlett said.
Fox News legitimized a compelling business model for a new generation of conservative media outlets.
“It spawned a great industry of the conservative media universe that’d include talk radio and websites,” Bartlett says. “To a large degree, they all sit on the foundation of Fox.”
Fox News changed how we think of a TV news network, said Kyle Pope, editor in chief of the
Columbia Journalism Review. “He clearly created the partisan right- wing media in America in modern incarnation. And he took it to a different level.” A LIGHTNING ROD He also energized a liberal media. The headline on a Rolling Stone article looking at Ailes’ legacy Thursday read, “Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever.”
Fox News is undergoing tumultuous changes brought on by sexual harassment scandals involving Ailes and others, while its parent company, 21st Century Fox, struggles to deal with a wave of lawsuits.
It has paid $45 million in settlements related to sexual harassment cases against Ailes, the company reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this month.
Two weeks ago, the network’s co-president Bill Shine resigned as women came forward with allegations of harassment at Fox News. Upon Shine’s departure, Murdoch promoted Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace as division heads — Scott of programming, Wallace of news.
All this follows the firing last month of Bill O’Reilly, one of the network’s top talents. The New
York Times reported that he was the subject of sexual harassment complaints by former female colleagues.
Before that, Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren, jumped ship from Fox News.
In a column written exclusively for USA TODAY, O’Reilly defended Ailes, arguing that “while opinions were many, facts were few. Roger was convicted of bad behavior in the court or public opinion. … He, himself, was stunned and never really recovered. ... Roger Ailes experienced that hatred and it killed him. That is the truth.”
Federal investigators reportedly are investigating Fox over settlements paid to individuals who filed sexual harassment suits against Ailes.
Neither Fox nor the Justice Department or other agencies would confirm an investigation.
Fox said in a statement it had communicated with the U.S. attorney’s office “for months” and would “continue to cooperate on all inquiries with any interested authorities.”
Ailes’ name is mentioned in several other discrimination suits filed against Fox, including one by 13 former and current Fox employees who allege the network engaged in “systemic discrimination based on race, ethnicity and national origin.”