USA TODAY International Edition
ROGER AILES’ GIFT FOR THE STORY
Fox News told tales of the heroic everyman’s struggle against bossy do- gooders
Roger Ailes is likely to go down in history as a political genius whose mastery of the news media reshaped the partisan landscape of America. But for all the superlatives about the power and influence of Ailes’ creation, Fox News, the encomiums will do him a fundamental disservice.
What made the 77- year- old New Yorker unique were not the dark arts of a Karl Rove or a Dick Morris. His genius didn’t hinge on the intricacies of cable news or a deep understanding of American culture as the sun set on the 20th century. BARD NOT BOOGEYMAN Ailes, who died Thursday, was a bard, a master storyteller. His power to unite an audience came from the same primal place as a fireside teller of tales in mankind’s cave days. He built a network where the regular American working man was the good guy and all the smarty- pants and dogooders of the world were the bad guys. Fox News commentators and reporters alike targeted their tribe and told it the stories it wanted to hear. The audience cheered and came back for more.
The New York Times’ obituary of Ailes says he shaped “the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and then became a dominant, often- intimidating force in American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News.”
Maybe that’s the way it looks from Manhattan, but if Fox News or Ailes were “dominant” in conservative politics in the years since its 1996 launch, history would have turned out a little differently. John McCain was more likely to be pilloried as an apostate than embraced by Fox News before he snagged the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Mitt Romney, a Massachusetts liberal technocrat who thought of Obamacare before Barack Obama did, was nev- er the Fox favorite to represent the GOP in 2012. In 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump’s tragicomic and bloody relationship with Fox veered from frenemy to outright enemy and back until the only other choice was a Clinton.
Fox News wasn’t any more powerful in enforcing conservative orthodoxy in public policy. Some Fox hosts were supine, while others raged in the years when President George W. Bush vastly expanded entitlements for the elderly. The “conservative” network did no better when Bush allied himself with Sen. Ted Kennedy to more deeply embed the federal government in local public education decisions. DOMINANT AUDIENCE Fox News and Ailes didn’t dominate anything in politics. Fox surfed in the wake of the Republican Party’s donor class, influential consultants and partisan personalities as they shaped public policy and fought for leadership roles, while the news network remained focused on one thing: building an audience.
And that’s where Fox dominated for more than 15 years as the No. 1 cable news network. Telling stories, where Bill O’Reilly’s regular “folks” were the heroes and pointy- headed intellectuals were the enemy, paid off profitably quarter after quarter.
And despite predictions of doom last year when Ailes was forced out of the Fox executive suite in a sexual harassment scandal, the audience is still there.
Media reporters and other Fox News outsiders often get hung up on the micro details of the cable juggernaut. But a focus on scandal, personalities, mistruths, short skirts and long legs miss the power of Ailes and Fox. His real gift was recognizing the power of an overarching story line to build an audience.
The irony is that it is the tendency of the mainstream news media to break stories down into simple morality tales that gave Ailes the opportunity to make Fox News such a success. Read environmental stories in the mainstream media and you will find that the good guys ( regular folks, environmentalists, scientists) and bad guys ( big business, lazy regulators) fall into neat ranks just as they do on Fox or, for that matter, in Hollywood’s Erin Brockovich.
What made Fox News so dominant for so long wasn’t just that Roger Ailes built a news network to tell just the right stories to gather a conservative audience, though he did make it a religion — but that his competitors in the news business had built theirs to drive that audience away.