The man who built Fox
Roger Ailes’ death comes at a time of turmoil in conservative journalism—turmoil caused in no small part by Ailes’ success in making Fox News into a media-political juggernaut.
Charles Krauthammer, one of Fox’s commentators, jokes that Ailes saw the opportunity to serve a niche market of half the country. The point of the quip is that the major networks had a liberal outlook and millions of Americans wanted something else.
But Ailes also saw that what these Americans wanted wasn’t only or even primarily ideological conservatism, whether of the free-market or traditional-religious varieties. What they wanted was nationalism. My National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg, also a Fox commentator, made the point well in a 2004 column. During World War II, Ernie Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize while wearing a military uniform and writing from an unabashedly pro-American point of view. Decades later, distinguished journalists were debating whether it would be ethical to warn American troops about an impending attack. A lot of Americans preferred the older attitude, and a network where anchors saw no problem with wearing a flag pin was for them.
Ailes stepped down last year amid scandal: He was accused of sexually harassing and abusing many women. Reports of a toxic sexual culture at the network had a certain credibility given the way it presented women on-camera.
But scandal is not the only problem Fox is facing. It is slipping in the ratings among the 25- to 54-year-olds advertisers want to reach. Joe Scarborough, who hosts a show on MSNBC, which is gaining in those same ratings, has a plausible two-part theory for why the ranking is changing: Conservatives have gotten less interested in politics and liberals more so since Trump took office.
It’s not a bad thing to have one network making different coverage decisions from the others. Fox was built to wrest control of the news agenda from CBS, the New York Times, and other outlets that reflected more liberal priorities. Coverage of James Comey at other places has sometimes been breathless. But there is a line between exercising editorial judgment and trying to create an alternative reality.
Fox is under a lot of pressure to fall on the wrong side of that line. We have a president who is fairly unpopular with the public at large but very popular with the network’s core audience. It can try to defend him or attack his critics. But it’s not surprising that Fox is tempted to respond to its situation by just not covering the news.