The spooky-looking, rotund man shown here is Roger Ailes, Chairman of Fox News. He's a former Republican operative and dirty-trickster, going back to the Nixon administration. Today, as leader of America's unfair and unbalanced "news" network, he's determined to give us a daily dose of birthers, terror mosques, death panels, and Tea Partiers. He, his staffers, and his on-air anchors and hosts are in the business of disguising far-right conservative propaganda as journalism. He's a dangerous fuck, and you should know about him.
There is an excellent article on Ailes by Tim Dickinson in the 6/9 issue of Rolling Stone titled "The Fox News Fear Factory". It's long but a good read. You can check it out by clicking on it under "Buster's Links".
What follows are a few excerpts from that piece.
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(From "The Fox News Fear Factory", by Tim Dickinson)
Rupert Murdoch had long been obsessed with gaining a foothold in the TV news business. He made a failed run at buying CNN. Even before he hired Roger Ailes, Murdoch had a germinal version of Fox News that he intended to air through News Corp. local affiliates. The false start included a 60 Minutes-style program that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program. "The idea of a masquerade was around prior to Roger arriving," says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the "left-wing bias" of CNN. "There's your answer right there as to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda," says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. "That's its original sin."
To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. "He is Fox News," says former commentator Jane Hall. "It's his vision and a reflection of him."
To watch even a day of Fox News -- the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that's held to the same standard as a late-October attack ad -- is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for TV in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan's budding Alzheimer's in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. "He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."
His dirtiest moment came in a 1988 TV ad focusing on Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had escaped from prison during a weekend furlough when Michael Dukakis was Massachusetts governor and later stabbed a man and raped a woman. "The only question," Ailes bragged to reporter, "is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand."
"Roger Ailes is the general," declared Bill O'Reilly. "And the general sets the tone of the army. Our army is very George Patton-esque. We charge. We roll."
Ailes know exactly who's watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network's viewers are old, with a median age of 65. Ads cater to the infirm, the immobile and the incontinent. The audience is almost exclusively white -- only 1.38% of viewers are African-American. "Roger understands audiences," says Rollins. "He knows how to target, which is what Fox News is all about." The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86%), conservative Christian (78%), Tea Party backer (75%), with no college education (66%), who is over age 50 (65%), supports the NRA (73%), doesn't back gay rights (78%), and thinks "government does too much" (84%). "He's got a niche audience and he's programmed to it beautifully," says a former News Corp. colleague. "He feeds them exactly what they want to hear."
From the time Barack Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a black nationalist, and a 1960's radical.
A recent study found that the ignorance of Fox viewers increases the longer they watch the network.
In 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand Tea Party rallies as "Fox News Channel Tax Day Tea Parties." Veteran journalist were taken aback. "I don't think I've ever seen a news network throw its weight behind a protest like [they did]," said Howard Kurtz, the then-media critic for the Washington Post.
The clearest demonstration of how Ailes has seamlessly merged both money and message lies in the election of John Kasich, a longtime Fox News contributor who eked out a two-point victory over Democrat Ted Strickland last November to become governor of Ohio. While technically a Republican, Kasich might better be understood as the first candidate of the Fox News Party. "The question is no longer whether Fox News is an arm of the GOP," says Burns, "but whether it's becoming the torso instead."
"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us," said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. "Now we're discovering that we work for Fox."
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